


Silver Bars

by An_Actual_Rat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cat Dean Winchester, Child Abandonment, Dean Winchester Needs a Hug, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Reveal, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Not Really Character Death, Skinwalker Dean Winchester, Skinwalkers - Freeform, Slow Burn, Torture, Touch-Starved Dean Winchester, and this definitely focuses more on the plot than the relationship, destiel comes in a lot later, he spends a lot of time shifted into a cat, locked up dean winchester, possibly graphic descriptions, silver - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:41:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 47,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28849995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/An_Actual_Rat/pseuds/An_Actual_Rat
Summary: During a fight with a pack of skinwalkers, Dean gets bit while trying to protect Sammy. John is not happy about his son suddenly becoming a skinwalker, and he decides the best thing to do is to tell everybody he is dead and lock him away where nobody would be able to find him. Years later, Sam and two angels find him, but not as Dean; they find an injured cat in a silver barred cage.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Gabriel/Sam Winchester
Comments: 114
Kudos: 279





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I absolutely fear skinwalkers, but I thought this would be a cool idea to write about. It's going to be quite a few chapters and will be a slow burn for the destiel. I hope you all like it!

Dean was only eight years old when he and his father hunted the creatures he would end up fearing the most. Sam was in the car nearby, as they had not even made it to the motel yet for John to drop them off and go off on his own like he usually did before they were stopped by the pack. John shoved a gun with silver bullets and a silver knife in Dean’s hands and told him to come with him. Dean wanted to stay behind to protect Sammy because there were so many, but of course John did not care. Sammy would be fine, he said. Sammy would not be in any harm if they did their job correctly.

Dean thought that was bullshit. Sam would always be in danger as long as they were in the hunting business. Dean was never safe, either. Hell, even John wasn’t immortal, no matter how much he seemed to think he was. There was no such thing as “fine” or “safe” for them anymore. John did not care. He only cared about getting the job done. 

Skinwalkers. It was a pack of skinwalkers trying to turn a neighborhood nearby. Dean was scared of monsters, of course, just like every other kid. Of course, other kids did not know what he did. He knew how to fight them - kill them - and could fend for himself in most situations theoretically (he was still only eight, after all), but that did not take the fear out of it. However, after encountering this pack, he found that he feared these monsters the most. They were the definition of evil in his book: bloodthirsty murderers who have turned as far from humanity as possible. They plotted invasions of places so that they could spread their ranks and corrupt humans into becoming like them. They were messier than vampires, more animalistic than werewolves, and were plainly just creepy as fuck. He did not like them.

As he and his dad ran towards the pack that was trying to come after their car, Dean was confused at first when he saw what they looked like. The man coming at him looked like a regular human! And there was even a dog at his side! Was his dad confused? What if they were just regular people taking their dogs on a jog?

And then John shot the dog with a silver bullet, and it started shrieking in an inhuman way, its fur and skin burning around its wound. It dropped to the ground, trying to get rid of the pain, and then it started crawling after them again, slower this time. Dean wished it had just died. Seeing it continue on even after it was shot made any hope of getting out of this situation alive drain quickly from his body. 

“What are they?” Dean yelled to his dad, having never been taught about these yet. He was young, so most of the monsters he was an expert about were things like ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. He had knowledge on some other more obscure ones, but he was no expert in them like his dad.

“Skinwalkers!” John said back. “Silver makes them weak, but shooting them won’t always do it. You should decapitate them to make sure they’re dead!”

As more got closer, Dean began to see other forms that they had taken. He saw one that was a cat, one that was a wolf, and even one that seemed to be a bear. Were they able to shapeshift into all of these creatures? Who knew what else they were! What if they were the bugs around them too? Or one of the geese in the flock flying away from the fight, abandoning their usual v-formation? This situation did not look too good. 

The two of them got to work. Dean did most of the shooting: slowing them down and even managing to kill one or two of the weaker ones with bullets alone. John chopped their heads off left and right, not giving them the chance to get past them and to the car with Sammy. The pack wasn’t too huge, and they were even able to take down the bear, so it was a good fight in the end. Neither of them got bit, neither were injured at all really, and, most important of all, Sammy was still safe behind them. They won. 

John was in a bad mood as they got back in the car. Dean could not figure out why when they had just gotten rid of those creatures, but he guessed it was because his plans of taking them out himself in a more throughout plan had been destroyed. Whatever. Dean was used to not getting a thanks from him for helping him out.

“What happened?” Sam asked as they began their drive to the motel once more. They would rest there for the night before inevitably moving on to another new location when John found a new case. That was just how life was for them.

“Finished the case,” John said. His tone was snappy, making Sam sink back in his seat a little bit. Dean felt bad for the little guy.

“Already?” Sam asked hesitantly.

“Yes.”

John did not give him much, but Sam was very young and did not need to hear any of the gory details. Well, that was Dean’s opinion, at least, and he was thankful for John’s silence right now. Usually he was not so considerate and would tell his youngest son the gruesome facts in order to scare him into hunting. Tonight, he was just brooding by himself, it seemed. 

Sam turned towards Dean, but Dean just gave him a look that said he’d tell him about it later. He wouldn’t really, but Sam did not need to know that right now. It was best to stay silent and not give dad a reason to go into a rage, so if Dean had to break a promise later, so be it.. He’d tell Sam about the skinwalkers while sparing him the worst of the details if he had to. 

The next day, John made Dean learn all about skinwalkers. He made him read article after horrid article, story after terrifying story, and note after rushed handwritten note about them. Then, he tested him, wanting to make sure he had all of the facts etched into his brain so that he would know what to do when they encountered them again.

When they encountered them again.

When.

Dean did not want to encounter them again, yet his dad was certain that they would one day. He did not like that at all.

“What is their weakness?” John asked. Dean had been forced to write out his own notes and memorize as much as he could, and he was not allowed to look at said notes while John quizzed him. He was meant to know all of this by heart at the ripe age of eight.

“Silver,” Dean said. A lot of creatures could not touch silver, so that was an easy one to remember. If he started to forget, he could remind himself that they can shapeshift into wolves similar to werewolves, who were also weak to silver.

“And does that mean it will kill them necessarily?”

“No,” Dean said confidently, having heard his father go through this multiple times already and reading it over and over again in every single article and story, “it will slow them down and possibly stop them for a while, but it will not kill them. Sometimes a silver bullet hit in exactly the right place will kill weak ones, but the strong will not die.”

“So what do you have to do to kill them?” John asked as he paced in front of Dean, a thoughtful look crossing his face as if he was trying to predict if Dean would get this right or not.

“Use a silver knife to cut off their heads,” Dean said. He could remember that. Chop off their heads, just like vampires. This was just all comparing these creatures to others he already knew, but knowing that they were viewed as so much worse in his head.

“What abilities do skinwalkers have? How do they blend in with the world?”

Dean had this in the bag. “They can shift into any animal, even humans, and take on the abilities of said animal, such as a bird being able to fly or a fish being able to breathe underwater. They blend in mostly by being humans and trying to interact with other humans or becoming common animals to infiltrate a home or to just seem innocent and safe. Many become dogs to gain the trust of a family, especially ones with kids. They can mimic others to trick people into thinking their loved ones are calling to them, but they mostly use their own voices to communicate.”

John kept the questions coming. “How do they build rank?”

“They infect people and make them turn like them.”

“How do they infect them?”

“By biting them.” Dean could not imagine what it would be like to have a skinwalker bite him. It seemed too horrifying to imagine one of those things with its teeth dug into his skin. He shuddered just thinking about it.

“How long does it take them to change into a skinwalker?” John asked, forcing him to focus back on the test.

“It varies, but usually only a few hours.” Dean wanted to puke at the thought of possibly knowing he was turning into his worst fear if it had happened to him.

“Is there a cure?”

“No, there is not any known cure.”

“And what do these monsters eat?”

Dean paused. He did not like the answer to this one. “Human hearts.”

John nodded, satisfied at his son’s knowledge of these creatures. He would test him again later to make sure that he would remember it after a while of not studying it. If he failed, he would be forced to study again and would have to go through all of the questioning once more.

Dean would not forget any of the answers.

Later that night, when John left the motel room to do who knew what, Sam and Dean sat in the uncomfortable chairs in the room and ate fast food for dinner. Sam watched Dean eat his bacon cheeseburger for a moment before turning to his own chicken nuggets. Being four, he was not too picky as long as the food tasted yummy. He took a chicken nugget, drowned it in some barbeque sauce, and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth.

“Woah,” Dean said, handing over a napkin, “you’re supposed to eat the food, not get it all over your mouth.”

Sam only laughed, not caring that he had barbeque smeared on his cheeks. He wiped his face with the napkin, completely missing the barbeque spots.

Dean loved it when his brother was happy. He knew growing up as a hunter was not going to be a fun and happy time for him, but in moments like these where they could enjoy eating together and not worry about a case since it was already over were a blessing to him. Sammy would smile in times like these - laugh like he was now. Dean wished they could have more moments like this.

Sam ate a few more chicken nuggets before turning to ask Dean about the last case again.

Dean considered him for a moment. “It was normal, just like any other. We fought some monsters and we won.”

“No,” Sam disagreed, “they stopped the car.”

“We just ran into them sooner than expected.”

“Okay.”

And that was that, or so Dean thought. He had hoped to keep the gory details from Sam in order to spare him as much trauma as possible. He knew dad was bringing him up the same way he was: to fight monsters and be scared. However, he did not want that for his brother. He wanted Sammy to have as much of a normal life as he could give him. Sure, their father was with them, but Dean felt like he was raising Sam more than he was. He was the one there for him while his father only taught them how to fight. 

When John came back, though, Sammy had to go and ask him about the case too. Dean knew he should have known better than to think that John would not tell Sam anything. When Sammy asked, he found himself praying to whoever would listen that their father would keep quiet.

Nobody answered that prayer, of course.

John told Sam all about the skinwalkers. He explained the facts about them, all the ones he made Dean memorize, and told him stories of the evils they do. Sammy looked horrified at it all, but he kept listening. He was smart enough to know that he should not interrupt John. 

Dean was jealous of Sammy, though. He was young enough that he would forget most of what dad said without having John yell at him for forgetting yet. In the next few years, John would start making him memorize things too, but for now, Sammy was allowed to forget as much as his mind allowed him to. 

Dean wished he could forget.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean Winchester had sixteen years of age under his belt, a newly acquired driver’s license, and a perfectly steady home life, thank you very much. Sure, it was not like most people’s: he didn’t live in a house or an apartment, have any lifelong friends, or even get through one year at a single school, but it was still normal to him! He moved a lot, met and forgot so many people, and spent his freetime taking care of his younger brother and fighting monsters. It was perfectly consistent.

Who was he kidding? His life wasn’t steady at all.

He had to deal with lying to all of the teachers and other students at school about what his father did for a living and why they moved around so much. He had to explain why he couldn’t make any solid friends or why he would not accept any of their numbers. The last time he gave somebody his number and wanted to try and stay friends with them, he had to get a new burner phone the next week and lost the chance to do so. That poor soul probably thought he ghosted him because he didn’t like him.

He also had to take care of his brother all the time, but he did not mind that one as much. He loved Sammy, even when the twelve year old had an attitude about the life they were given. He didn’t mind having to be the one to go out and buy them food, preparing said food on the rare occasion that it was not fast food or cold served food, and making sure that his brother was overall safe and healthy. Dean would do anything for his brother, and he knew Sammy loved him very much too. He was starting to grow up more, and while he complained about what they went through and sounded like he was blaming Dean for the things he couldn’t do, he knew that Dean was not at fault. Sammy knew Dean was just looking out for him and doing his best at keeping their father from ruining him more than he already was.

He wished he could say that their father felt the same way about both of them. But no, he was always out doing his own things when he wasn’t teaching them how to hunt, bringing them on cases, or booking them a motel for the stay. Dean wasn’t even sure John would truly care anymore if one of them got hurt.

Well, he would probably care if Sam got hurt. Dean, though? Probably not.

Would he?

Dean did not like to dwell on it much. He followed all of his dad’s orders and did his best to show him a son he could be proud of. He didn’t question anything like Sam did. He was the perfect hunter child, and yet he still could not get his dad to tell him he was proud of him.

Whatever. He didn’t need praise anyway. He could deal with not being the favorite child just because he was born first and was given the responsibility to take care of another human when he himself was still only a child.

The three of them were currently driving to the location of their next case. Dean stared out the window as a lot of nothing passed by, unsure of how far they were from their destination. They were heading to a small town that had recently had a few peculiar deaths and missing persons reported. John had a feeling that it was their type of problem, so off they were to look into the matter. 

“Are there any connections between the victims?” Dean asked. It had been a while since any of them had spoken, and it was weird speaking into the silence. John had turned off the radio a few hours ago when he got into a pissy mood, and Dean wasn’t sure if it was a good time to turn it back on even though he seemed to have calmed down. Talking felt dangerous too, but he risked it to get info about the case. “Maybe it’s a vengeful ghost. They usually target people who are similar to something or someone they are mad at from their life.”

“Their descriptions in the news articles were vastly different from each other,” John said, thankfully in a better mood. “I didn’t see any connections from them, but we might find one when we talk to their families.”

Usually John went to talk to the families posing as an FBI agent or whatever story he came up with alone since Sam and Dean were so young, but this time John let Dean come with him while Sam stayed in the motel room. John and Dean put on their nicest “FBI agent-esq” suits. Dean was going to act like he was in an FBI training program and as if he was shadowing John to see how to work in the field. In Dean’s opinion, it was a very poor cover story, but John was confident that it would work.

They first went to the home of the first victim. The lady who lived there lost her son to whatever was haunting this town a month ago. She seemed skeptical about their disguise at first, but decided to believe them when they showed their fake badge and lied a little about the program. During a more normal time in her life, she probably would have questioned it a lot more, but in her time of grieving, she was a lot more naive since she wanted as much help as she could get.

“I told all of this to the police already,” the lady said. “Can’t you get my statements from them?”

“We have to do our own investigation, ma’am, I’m sorry. I know it’s hard to talk about, but if we want to find out what killed your son, we have to get all of the details that we can,” John said.

“We’re here to help you,” Dean added, shifting in the uncomfortable chair the lady had directed them to sit in, “not to cause you more pain.”

The lady sighed before starting into her story. She told them about how her son was a happy boy who was just about to head to college for his first year. He was smart, outgoing, and had such a great future ahead of him. One day, though, she returned home from work to find his corpse lying on the ground. Blood was everywhere. 

“It was so bad that the coroner could not figure out exactly what happened. He said it looked like he was ripped apart by some monster, but he could not tell why since it had to have been a human that did it with the circumstances of how they got in and such,” the lady said. “Whoever did it to him was very angry. They even left the door open at the end, and the dog got out. I’ve went searching for him a few times, but he’s gone. I have a feeling he was spooked by the murderer coming in and attacking my son.”

Dean and John thanked her for her time and left for the next house. There, they got a similar story, except this time it was a cat who was gone after the incident. It wasn’t until the third house, where they were talking to the parents of a girl who had gone missing and her brother who was found dead in the kitchen, that Dean put the pieces together.

“He looked like he had big bites taken out of him,” the father said. “It was like some animal had been hungry.”

Hungry for humans? Bites? 

“Do you know if there were any specific parts of him missing?” John asked. “Was it just random mauling or were they going for a specific part of the body?”

“It was very odd, but the heart was missing. It looked like it was ripped out and taken with them or… well, police suspect that they might have… eaten it. They said that there have been cults before where the members would kill and eat the hearts of their victims because they thought it would give them immortality or strange powers. They said they don’t see much other proof of a cult being here, but they will still look into the possibility.”

Human hearts.

“You didn’t happen to have any pets that have now gone missing, have you?” Dean asked.

“Uh, well, yeah,” the mother said, “we did, actually. A dog. She was a little puppy we had recently gotten the kids for doing well in school. She got out somehow and we can’t find her. None of the neighbors have spotted her either. It’s like she completely vanished. We’re worried that she might have gotten into the woods and hunted by a predator or something. She wasn’t a big, strong dog at all.”

Animals at all crime scenes.

“Thank you for talking with us,” John said as the two of them stood up to leave.

It couldn’t be.

Once back in the Impala and heading back to the motel, Dean asked his father the question he was scared to know the answer to. “Are we dealing with what I think we are?”

“Skinwalkers,” John said.

He was afraid of that.

John dropped Dean off at the motel before driving off to search for where the pack could possibly be hiding. If they were already beginning to kill off people in the town, then they would have a solid nest somewhere and were probably even in other homes as well. John wanted to get this case done quickly before more people were eaten or turned. It was already too far into their infiltration operation as it was.

Dean entered the motel room to find Sam watching a cartoon on the TV. He was lounging lazily on the bed, a bored look on his face. As soon as Dean walked in, he immediately sat up and paused the TV.

“How did it go?” Sam asked, wanting to know all the details like usual. He might have wished to be a normal kid with a normal school life, but he still did not want to be kept from any of the case information.

“Hello to you too, Sammy,” Dean chuckled, plopping down on the bed next to him.

“Did you find out anything? Is it a ghost?”

Dean did not want to tell Sam what it was, but he knew he had to. John would just reveal it later. He just did not like talking about these monsters. “It’s a pack of skinwalkers.”

“Oh,” Sam said, “we haven’t run into those since-”

“Since you were like four, yes,” Dean stated. 

“Does dad know where they are so we can kill them?”

“That’s what he’s trying to find right now. He’ll find where they’re living and we’ll go out with some silver knives to chop off their heads.”

“Can I come?” Sam asked. “I’m already bored in this room.”

“I wish you wouldn’t have to, but I’m sure dad will make both of us go. I fought them when I was eight, so in his books you’ll surely be okay with fighting them at twelve.”

That night, they ate food from the diner across the street, played some games on the machines they had in the diner, and went to bed happily all before their father returned to the motel. Dean slept fine for the most part, but in the morning, he jumped awake from a nightmare he had about skinwalkers taking away his family. He looked around the room to find that John was back and that he and his brother were already awake. They were both prepping weapons: silver weapons.

“Welcome to the land of the living,” John said. “We’re going on the hunt today.”

“You found the pack?” Dean asked, hoping that John would reveal that it was all a mistake and it was simply some wolf attacks or something like that. Of course, there was no chance of that happening since the evidence was all in front of them, and obviously John found them since he was getting their weapons ready.

“Yup,” he confirmed, “and it wasn’t even that hard, either. They weren’t exactly hiding the fact that they are there. They seem to figure that this town is too stupid to see what is happening, and frankly, I agree. It’s crazy that these people have not yet connected what is happening, even if they don’t believe in monsters. They can’t not see that this pack is the problem! It’s a good thing we showed up, I guess.”

“Were there a lot?” Maybe if there were only a few, John would let him and Sam stay back. He could claim that they would just get in the way or something. He really, really did not want to go face those creatures.

“A lot,” John said, “we’re going to have to watch our backs today. It’s going to be a tough one.”

Great.

They drove in the Impala until they were at the edge of the town border. From there, they entered the woods on the side of the road on foot, trying to be as quiet as they could be so as to not alert any of the monsters that they were there. It was going to be hard to sneak in, as their senses were very much more heightened than theirs. They could probably already smell them coming.

They each carried a giant silver knife so that they could cut their heads off. They also had guns with silver bullets to slow them down, but with a large pack like they were facing, it would probably be better to focus on killing as many as they could than to put all of their energy into shooting them and delaying them a few seconds. 

Dean felt like his heart was beating out of his chest. He was terrified as they made their way closer and closer to where the pack was living. He had a really bad feeling about all of this. 

Something was going to go wrong. 

He had to keep going, though. His family wasn’t going to stop just because he wanted to back out, and he had to be there to help fight. He couldn’t chance them or anybody else getting hurt just because he was too scared to face his fears. He could do this.

They finally came across a house way back within the trees. John had told them on their way there that he had seen a few cars travel a well hidden path that led to this house earlier that day. He also noticed a lot of animals going that way as well. It was definitely where the pack was staying, and that was made even more evident by all the bloodied animals and stripped bones that were nearby. 

Dean wondered how many of them were human. Skinwalkers did eat human hearts, but he hoped that they were also able to eat animals to satisfy their hunger too because there was no way those were all humans from that small town. It also looked like they enjoyed more than just the hearts since most of the bones were completely void of meat. They ate hearts to live, as was their biology, but apparently they consumed other parts for their own enjoyment.

They waited for a moment, hiding in the trees away from the house. It was silent. Too silent. It felt like there was nobody there, but if the pack was so huge then there would have had to be some of them wandering around their space. Why weren’t they seeing any of them?

“Shit,” John suddenly cursed. Dean jumped at the sudden sound, and he looked around to see what made his father react like that.

What he saw made his heart drop.

Out from the trees came many human and animal creatures. Skinwalkers of every shape and size came out of hiding, revealing that they had been watching them this entire time. Suddenly, they weren’t the predators anymore.

They were the prey, and they were completely surrounded.


	3. Chapter 3

Flashbacks from the fight from when Dean was eight went through his mind. He remembered shooting at the skinwalkers while his dad chopped their heads off. This time, he would be chopping some heads off too. His brother was there this time as well. While having more on their side should have been a good thing, Sammy being there just made him feel worse about the situation. He was filled with more worry, and that could affect his fighting.

Skinwalkers surrounded them from all sides, blocking any possible exits that they might have had. They had obviously been watching them and waiting for them to get into the right position. They were going to ambush them, and they were probably going to die right then and there.

He hoped Sammy knew how much he loved him.

A skinwalker in the form of a human made the first move. She came running at them, and Dean was horrified when he realized that he recognized her. This girl was the missing daughter from the last house they had visited earlier. He had seen her in the photos that lined the family’s walls. She had been turned, and she was likely the one to kill and eat her brother. 

Dean only had time to blink once before she was upon him, mouth wide open as she leapt at him in an attempt to bite him. He managed to dodge out of her way, moving to his right and quickly swinging his knife at her in an attempt to slice her skin. The moment was too fast, and he missed by a longshot, but luckily his father had his back. John brought his knife down on her neck and she crumbled, dead. It was too bad she had been turned. She might have had a future if their family had not gotten that puppy.

“Split up! We can’t lure them all in the middle like this or else they’ll overwhelm us too quickly!” John shouted before running at a group of the skinwalkers.

Dean did not want to leave his brother to fight alone, but he knew his father was correct. It would be harder to fight freely if they were back to back while the creatures surrounded them. They needed more room to dodge, fight, and shoot if needed without having to worry about accidentally slicing each other or having the other get bit if they dodged at the wrong time. Dean ran to his right, immediately going into fighting a group of human and dog shifted skinwalkers. Sam went the opposite way, getting more dogs and cats in his way.

There were so many. Dean felt like every time he killed one, three more replaced it. He slashed wildly, ganking one after the other. One came from the left, he dodged to the right, cut through its neck, and was immediately jumping forward to escape one attacking from behind. A small dog leapt up at him. It was very easy to kill it, but since it was coming straight for him, it splashed blood all over him. It was disgusting, but he was expecting it. He would be covered head to toe by the end of this fight.

Dean got backed up into a tree, which was very bad because it limited his space and made it harder to dodge their attacks. He had to get back into open space, but there were so many coming at him that there was nowhere for him to move. It took all he had just to avoid getting bit. One scratched him, making him grunt in pain as he cut clean through its throat. Another went right for his ankles, trying to play dirty and bite him right where it would be hard to defend. Luckily for him, it was just a small dog, so he was able to easily kick it away and kill it before it could get its teeth in him. 

How was he going to get back to where he would have a better chance of fighting? There were too many to cut through and make a path away from the tree, and even if he did manage to start chopping his way out, the others would just close rank around him once again. This pack had been building up numbers for years now, it seemed like. Dean wondered how many poor, small towns had people picked off one by one for there to be so many. He also wondered if they were able to breed on their own, for he could not wrap his mind around the thought of so many people getting changed into such a horrid creature. How had they all let their humanity go? Were they really not able to keep from giving in so easily or was it simply from the influence of the others in their packs that made them turn evil? Dean wasn’t sure, and he never really wanted to find out.

An idea came to him. The bullets in their guns were just to slow the skinwalkers down if they needed to use it, but surely they could also be used to scare some of them back. The newly turned ones would especially be worried that the bullets would kill them and would want to get away in an attempt to live. He didn’t know if it would work, but at the rate this fight was going, it was worth the risk.

Dean pulled out his gun and pointed it at the hoard in front of him, quickly shooting at as many as he could see. His plan seemed to work a little, as some of the skinwalkers backed up, hissing and screeching in pain as the silver burned them. It killed a few of the weaker ones, but the stronger were simply annoyed. It did give Dean an opportunity to escape into the open, and he took it the moment he saw it so that he could have more room to fight. He kept shooting, hitting as many as he could, watching as the rare few died and the others dropped for a few seconds. 

One of the closer skinwalkers to him came at him, swiping his claws at his chest as if he wanted the heart inside. He likely did, and Dean did not feel like giving it to him. He blocked the claws with the gun before slashing out with the knife, adding another head to the piles growing on the ground. He shot two more skinwalkers before his bullets ran out. He pressed the trigger a couple times, frustrated that they were gone so soon and he had no way of putting new ones in without getting mauled immediately. He threw the gun at one of the monsters, trying to hit his head but only managing to get his arm. Oh well, it wouldn’t have killed him anyway.

The fight continued, and Dean was proud to say that he was doing very well. He had yet to make any fatal mistakes, and he had killed so many at this point that he felt it was very possible for them to finish them all off and all be perfectly okay in the end.

Woah, there are only a few left in front of him! He somehow fought off so many skinwalkers! There were three still coming after him, all in human form.

The first tried to go straight for his throat. It wanted to bite in as if it were a vampire, but Dean would not let it. He ducked at the last second so that it tripped over him, threw it onto the ground, and slashed its throat. He saw the life drain from it, satisfied at his ganking skills.

The second growled at him before leaping towards him, intent on ripping the heart out of his chest. Dean stumbled back a little bit before counter attacking. His knife cut into its arms a few times and even made a mark against its cheek. The silver made its skin smoke as it burned it, but his attacks only made it angier. It came towards him again, trying to kill him, but he just stepped forward and swiped towards it once again. This time, its head rolled to the ground.

The third was a lot smarter than the other two. These creatures were like humans where some were smarter and others were dumber. Dean knew they could speak and communicate well with humans, but right now they only made inhuman noises, focused entirely on the attack. The skinwalker tried to fight him with his fists, managing to dodge some of Dean’s own strikes as it did so. It fought harder than the others, possibly because it was the last of those fighting him left, but even it could not defeat him. Its head was soon detached from the rest of it. 

Dean panted, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. He only had a few seconds to collect himself, however, because his dad and brother were still in the middle of the fight. Looking around him, he found that the two of them were also down to their last skinwalkers, and soon they would also be finished with them. 

They had won.

Dean debated who he should go help when he suddenly heard his father yell out to him.

“Dean!” John yelled. Dean turned to him, trying to see what was going on. His father was still fighting, but he was still going strong. He did not seem to need help, so why was he calling to him? But then he pointed towards Sam, and when Dean looked over at his brother again, he saw something that chilled him to his bones.

His little brother was in trouble.

“Sammy!” Dean shouted as he took off towards him, not caring if his shouts caused any of the skinwalkers to turn their attention towards him. He wasn’t paying any mind to anything but getting to his brother, not caring if anything happened to him as long as he could save the one person he cared for most in this world.

All Dean could think about was that Sammy was in trouble. Sam had gotten pushed back by one of the skinwalkers. It was only one, which should not have been too much of a problem. He should have been able to simply lash out and kill it in one swipe. 

He would have been able to… if he had still had his silver knife.

When John had shouted to Dean, it was because the skinwalker was able to knock the knife out of Sam’s hand, making it fly too far away for him to retrieve it in time. Sam wouldn’t be able to run past the skinwalker, much less get past, pick up the knife, and turn around to kill it before it got to him. 

Sam was trapped.

“Get away from my brother!” Dean screamed as he tried to get there in time. He had to save his brother. He couldn’t let Sam die or worse; he couldn’t allow Sam to be turned. Dean felt too far away. 

He wouldn’t make it in time.

The skinwalker knocked Sam to the ground in one push, and Dean watched in horror as Sam hit his head and was promptly knocked out. Fuck, how could he just be knocked out that fast? It must have been one hard hit.

“You son of a bitch!” Dean cursed, his adrenaline causing him to really push himself into running as fast as humanly possible. He had to get there in time. He couldn’t live without his brother. He knew this case would turn out badly, and here he was about to witness it all turning to shit as his brother died.

He was only twelve. He couldn’t die yet.

The skinwalker stepped closer to his fallen brother, baring its teeth as it got ready to finish its attack. Dean could not let that happen.

And luckily, he made it.

Dean forced himself between the skinwalker and his brother, ready to kill the fucker. He had every intention to use the very large, very silver knife in his hand to chop the head off the dick that meant harm to his brother.

But he never got the chance.

He never even got to lift his hand even a little.

It was way too late.

Dean cried out in pain as agony washed over his body. His shoulder felt like it was suddenly on fire as teeth sunk into his skin. It ripped past his clothes and went straight into his body. It hurt worse than Hell. He wanted it to end. He never felt pain like this before, and he needed it to stop.

It was torture.

Worse than his dreams had predicted. 

Dean had been bit.


	4. Chapter 4

When Dean was eleven, he broke his arm during a case. He had gotten slammed into a wall by a ghost they were chasing, and it snapped his bone on impact. His dad had to rush him to the ER because it was so bad that he couldn’t deal with it himself like he usually did with all of their injuries. He had to wear a cast for two and a half months! 

At the time, he had thought that was the worst pain he had ever felt. His preteen mind thought it was the worst pain imaginable and that nothing would ever be able to top it.

Eleven year old Dean had no clue what was coming for him. This was so, so much worse.

The pain was overwhelming. Dean didn’t even know how to describe it. It stung, but it was also worse than simply stinging. It was like many small, sharp knives were stabbing him, yet it was so much worse than being stabbed. There were no words for what he was feeling.

Just… agony.

The skinwalker’s teeth were still dug into his skin. No matter how much he struggled, it would not let him go. It felt so weird, unlike anything he had ever experienced before. It felt like the creature was sucking, but at the same time he thought that it was injecting something into his veins. Maybe it was doing both. Maybe this was the turning process.

He hoped not. Please let this be how they killed their victims. 

Dean grew weak as the sounds of fighting died down around him. He couldn’t tell what was going on, though. Had his father killed the ones he was fighting off? Had they killed him instead? Was John currently going through what he was right now? There was no way to tell through the blazing headache he now felt on top of the feeling of what was like fire being set to his entire body. 

Pure, excruciating pain.

It was the definition of torturous misery. 

Dean gasped as suddenly the teeth around his shoulder went slack. The skinwalker’s body slumped against him as its head fell to the ground, its teeth pulling out of his skin with a disgusting squash as it went. Dean found himself falling onto his back on the ground, pushing the body away from him as best as he could as he withered in pain. The teeth were gone, but his body still felt like it was on fire. Something was happening to him, and the fact that he wasn’t dead meant only one other thing.

He was turning.

Dread filled his heart as the agony continued. There was no getting away from the pain. Oh, there was so much pain, and he wished with all his might for it to Just. Go. Away. But it did not.

Squinting his eyes open as best as he could, Dean found his father leaning over him. He had been the one to kill the skinwalker. There weren’t any others around them as far as he could tell, which meant the battle was over. They killed every single one.

Well, in a little bit, it would be almost every single one.

“What the Hell did you do!” John yelled at him, his words distorted to his ears but still unmistakable. Dean could tell that John was furious. His face was red in anger and Dean was starting to worry that he would turn the knife in his hand against him.

“S-Sammyy-y,” Dean croaked out, but he wasn’t sure if his father could understand what he was saying. He could barely understand himself. It hurt too much to speak, and his father was scaring him a lot right now, but he had to make sure his brother was okay.

“I wanted you to kill that thing and save your brother, not let it bite you!!” John was still screaming, ignoring Dean’s own voice. “You had to go and ruin everything, didn’t you?! You’re one of them now! You’re a  _ monster _ !”

Tears were rushing down Dean’s cheeks, both from the pain of his wounds and transformation as well as from the words his father was yelling. 

“B-Bu-” Dean tried to speak, but he could not. He could barely concentrate on anything. He was already straining to hear what his father was shouting, and trying to get his body to obey any of his commands wasn’t working. 

“Shut up!” John shouted. “You do not get to speak! You’re nothing but a lowly creature!”

He had just wanted to protect Sammy. How did it go from saving his brother to getting yelled at for preventing this from happening to Sam?

“Get to the car,” John ordered him. “We’ve got to bring Sam back to the motel. He’s hurt because of you.”

Wait… he wasn’t going to kill him?

Dean was confused. Surely, John knew he was going to end up hurting somebody if he was allowed to live. Why was he making him get in the car with them?

John didn’t help Dean up at all. He spared him no glance as he went to pick up Sam, effortlessly carrying the twelve year old through the woods towards where they parked the Impala. Dean was expected to follow, but he was unsure if he could even get to his hands and knees to crawl after them, much less walk after them. His entire body shook as he tried to turn himself on the ground, and it took him minutes to get on his stomach instead of his back. It took him even longer to maneuver himself to the closest tree so that he could force himself to get to his two feet.

Once he was standing (well, barely), he slowly made his way through the woods, bracing himself against every tree he could as he tried to breathe through the pain. Eventually, he made it back to the road. The Impala was waiting for him, and he found himself thankful that his father hadn’t decided to drive off without him when he was taking so long to get there. Then again, he had no idea what was planned for him now, so maybe it would have been better if he never got in that Impala again.

John was standing by the back of the car, waiting for him. Dean could see Sammy sat in the front seat, slumped against the window and still unconscious. 

“Get in,” John said once Dean made his way over to the car. Dean crawled into the backseat, and as soon as he was in, John slammed the door shut behind him before getting into the driver’s seat. Dean wasn’t capable of getting his seatbelt on, so he ended up just laying in the backseat, one hand clenching his shoulder and the other his stomach, as he was beginning to feel nauseous too. John drove back to the motel as quickly as he could, not wanting to waste any time. 

When they got to the motel, Dean began to sit up to exit the car. He was shocked to find his father locking the doors on him, though. John glared at him from the front seat, looking like he couldn’t believe Dean wanted to get out and go to the motel room.

“You’re not leaving this car,” John told him.

“Wh-Why?” Dean managed to get out. He was still hurting everywhere, and he just wanted to go lay in his motel bed and get through it somewhere comfortable. He knew his father would either kill him or try to somehow find a way to control him later on, but he wasn’t fully transformed yet. He wanted to sleep away the pain.

“I’m not letting you near any humans anymore. You may be a monster, but I will not allow you to become a killer. I will kill you myself if I find you killing and eating like the rest of your kind,” John said.

His kind. Dean was no longer human, and his father would never think of him as his son ever again. What was going to happen to him now?

“I’m going to bring Sammy inside, and then I am going to bring you to a place I know where you won’t be able to hurt anybody. We have to get you there before you fully turn,” John further explained as he got out of the car. He went to the other side to retrieve Sam, and Dean watched as he carried his brother into the motel while leaving him to wait for him to get back.

His father was going to bring him somewhere he couldn’t hurt anybody? Could it be? Could he be trying to help him instead of killing or hurting him? Was Dean going to be okay after all?

Soon, John was back in the car once again and was pulling out of the motel room parking lot. They were on the country roads moments later, flying down the street way above any safe speed limit. Dean felt himself getting more nauseous from the motion, but he willed himself not to puke. That would make his father angrier than he already was. 

Wherever they were going must not have been very far from where their motel was. It only took a few hours to drive there. Dean could not tell where they were, though. They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, and there was only a single old, large building in front of them. He had never seen this place before, and his father surely had never talked about it in the past. It was a mystery, and Dean sensed that he would not like what was waiting for him in there.

What was his father planning to do? Was this just a safe place for him to be like he said or was there something more in there? Dean was scared to find out, but John was already getting out of the car. The door was opened for him, and Dean was forced out of the car. John did not help him walk, just watched him stumble as he tried to make his way towards the odd entrance to wherever they were. 

John brought out a key from one of his pockets and used it to open the door. He entered through the doorway, only pausing to let Dean in too and to lock the door behind them before continuing into the building.

What Dean saw inside was insane. He had never seen anything like it. It was huge and decorated in all kinds of cool stuff! They walked through rooms filled with all kinds of books that Sam would surely geek over. There were giant tables, old maps, beautiful stairways, and weird machinery that he had never seen before all over the place. Wherever he was, it seemed to come out of every hunter’s wildest dreams.

Dean was led to a room towards the back of the building and down some stairs. John opened a door, and when Dean went inside, he was horrified to find what seemed to be a lot of weapons and, worse of all, a cage.

“What are we doing here?” Dean asked, finally able to speak more than a single word at a time despite still being in pain.

“You’re going to stay here for the rest of your life,” John said.

Dean turned to him in shock. “Wh-What?”

John glared at him before grabbing a hold of his arm and dragging him to the cage that was against one of the walls. Dean struggled in his grip, but he was too weak to pull away. He could only watch as his father opened the cage with a key that was nearby. Then, he was shoved into the cage. John closed the door behind him, locking him into the small space.

“Hey!” Dean shouted as he tried to grab the bars of the cage to shake them. However, when his skin met the metal, he yelped in more pain. Yanking his hands away, he found that they had blisters covering them. A little bit of smoke had even risen from his skin. 

The cage was made of silver bars.

“You can’t do this to me!” Dean protested. “I am your son! I thought you cared about me!”

“My son died tonight,” John said. “All I see in front of me is a monster that will never be let into the world. This is the perfect opportunity for me to keep you here as an experiment to see how skinwalkers react to different meats and stuff like that. You’re my new lab rat.”

John started to walk away, probably to leave him and go back to Sam in the motel. Dean panicked as he left, not wanting to be left alone there, especially when he couldn’t even touch anything since the bars were the only things in reach and they would burn him.

“I did everything you ever asked of me!” Dean yelled. He wanted to keep shouting after his father, but he found himself growing weaker. His transformation was almost over, but the power he was feeling was immediately getting drained from him by the silver around him.

He was trapped, alone, and had no idea when his father would come back. And worst of all…

He was starting to get hungry.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made an outline for this story so that I could write it easier without getting stuck, and I might have accidentally planned out 20-30 chapters worth of material. I don't know if I will use all of my ideas on where to go with this, but I am liking where it is going, so expect a lot more chapters in the future. I am very determined to finish this one.  
> Hope you enjoy the chapter! Thank you so much for reading! I always happily accept and love constructive criticism if you have any, so don't be scared to be critical of my writing if you feel you need to be!

If Dean thought the initial bite and transition were bad, then what followed was absolute Hell. It wasn’t enough that he was simply a skinwalker now. No, of course the transition would immediately lead straight into him being forced into shifting. He could not control his form, and he really wished that he could because the feeling of his bones shifting did not tickle in the slightest. 

When he first heard the crack of his bones breaking down, he was confused. He assumed that he would have control over his new powers right away. However, he knew he was wrong the moment more pain came to him seconds later. He screamed as he felt himself grow smaller, all the feelings amplified by the silver surrounding him. 

Once he felt his body still, he found that he was covered in fur and felt like the cage had grown around him. He knew that it was him that shrunk, not the cage that had increased in size, but for some reason that made less sense to his brain. He could only lay there for a while, trying to control his breath and get through the headache that pounded through his skull. When he was able to move, he found that he was scared to look down to see what he turned into. 

Hoping that he was just going insane, he looked down while praying that he was still human. He wanted nothing more than to still be normal. He didn’t want to be a skinwalker.

All of his hopes were dashed away when he saw his paws. He couldn’t see what his face looked like, but he knew what he had turned into. 

A dog.

A fucking dog.

Just like those that he had fought the day before. 

He really was a monster now.

Dean had to lay in the middle of the cage to avoid the silver bars. It was a fairly large cage, obvious from that fact that he could fit in it as a human. The bars were too close together for him to escape through, unfortunately. Perhaps if he were an even smaller animal, he would be able to fit through the bars with minimal burns, but he could not test this theory without control over his shifting. For now, he was stuck laying there with his own thoughts.

He laid there.

And laid there.

And continued laying there.

Hours had gone by. The pain had died down for the most part, but that left Dean feeling more bored than he had ever felt before. His father had said that this was where he was going to be spending the rest of his life. How long was he going to live, especially now that he wasn’t human? He was already going out of his mind from a few hours, so how would he ever survive days, weeks, or even years? 

Part of him hoped that John was leaving him there to waste away without food. That way, he would die and would not have to be stuck there for so long by himself. His father had mentioned using him as an experiment, though. He knew he was going to be tortured here. He could feel it.

There was no getting out of it.

Speaking of his father, Dean started to wonder why he was so keen on following all of his orders. Why did he think so highly of the man when it was obvious that he didn’t care as much for him as he thought he did. Was all of this inevitable? Was he going to end up abandoned by his father all along?

Was it really just because he got bit?

Dean felt his bones begin to shift again, followed by his organs and his skin. It was less painful this time, but still verging on agonizing. He found himself screaming once more, but his voice was so shot and hoarse that it barely made it out of his throat. 

He felt himself get even smaller. Still not small enough to get through the bars, but maybe if this pattern of getting smaller and smaller continued, then he would get there. Knowing his luck, it would not happen. Dean still allowed himself a little bit of hope for that, though.

When the second shift was over, Dean found that he was able to recover from it sooner. He stood up on four legs, stretching as much as he could with his sore muscles. Looking at himself, he could only assume that he was now a cat. He felt better in this form, to be honest, because he was small enough that he would not risk accidentally bumping into the silver when he moved around a little. This cat form also had a lot more fur than the dog did, and this room was starting to get chilly. If there was a heater in this building, it clearly was not turned on - assuming the pace was even capable of electricity anymore. It would only get colder as the days went past.

Dean let himself settle down in this form. He closed his eyes, hoping that he would be able to stay as a cat for a while. Who knew what he would accidentally turn into. He could change into a horse and pass out immediately from the silver burning his skin all around. The thought frightened him.

As there was no entertainment, Dean began to think about his family. The people that he thought he could always count on to be there for him and love him. Now, John had betrayed him and Sammy probably thought he was dead by now.

Sammy… Dean worried a lot about his little brother. He knew that Sam wanted out of that life. All his brother wanted was to attend a single school like everybody else and have a normal life. He willingly went on hunts with them because he did not want to be left out or get into any arguments with their dad, but Dean knew the truth. He saw him looking at college magazines and searching for normalcy on the internet. It broke his heart to know that his brother wanted to leave the life of a hunter (and in doing so, him), but he did wish the best for him. 

Would Sam be able to go out on his own now that he was alone with John? Or would John force him to stay in the life? Dean had a bad feeling that John was going to do everything in his power to force Sam to stay and hunt with him, especially when he was old enough to make his own choices.

Dean thought about his situation compared to Sam’s. He did not want his father to tell him that he was dead. Sam would be devastated. It could either turn him fully against hunting or pull him towards it like it had their father when Mary died.

Maybe Sam would escape and live without pain. Dean did not want anything like this to happen to him too. Not when he and his brother had such a strong familiar bond. He loved his brother, and he knew Sammy loved him too. Sam had even given him that necklace…

…Where was the necklace?

Dean began to panic as he looked around him, dizzying himself in the process of turning so quickly over and over again. He pushed through the clothes that laid on the ground around him, forgotten when he had shifted since he was too small for them now. He made a mess of it all, throwing his shirt here, his pants there, and even managed to knock his underwear between two of the cage’s bars. He looked for so long, but he found nothing.

The necklace was gone.

He tried to remember what might have happened to it. He thought long and hard about what he had done since he had last seen it, even allowing himself to go through some of those terrifying memories of him in the midst of that fight that ruined his life. 

Nothing. He couldn’t remember.

It must have fallen off in the Impala at some point. He had been in so much pain that he was wiggling around a lot when they were getting close to the building he was in. The necklace had to have slipped off without him noticing.

That meant his father had it. He had nothing with him to remember his brother by. Dean wanted to wrap it around him and feel the security that came with it: the security of knowing his brother cared about him, that he would miss him now that he was gone. Yet, he had nothing now. He was completely alone without even the spirit of his brother’s company.

This sucked.

Over the next few days, Dean took nap after nap. Every time he woke up, he still felt tired and sore. His father had yet to come back, and he was beginning to worry that he never would. He knew that he had wished for his father to just leave him to die, but as he got weaker and weaker, he found that the idea of death scared him a lot. 

He did not actually want to die, it seemed. Even if he had to live in this terrible place.

Dean had shifted into a few different animals now. A few days before, he found himself as a miniature pig. It was an odd sensation, but it was not as bad as when he next shifted into a komodo dragon. He was no longer even a mammal, which was not pleasant with how his body suddenly reacted differently to temperatures, and he did not appreciate how his tail would smack against the silver whenever he tried to move. He was way too long, and when he shifted again (this time to a wonderful, smaller sized hedgehog), he could not be happier. 

Currently, he was a hamster, and he was finally going to put his plan of escape into motion. John obviously did not take into account that he could turn into a smaller animal. Even if he had to wait until his body decided to be so small, it was still a thing he could do now. 

Dean was small enough to fit through the gap of the bars.

He creeped towards the bars, eying the silver. It looked like the silver was mocking him, taunting him over the fact that they stood in his way. Joke’s on them, he was about to escape past them. He would show them who was boss.

To get through the bars without getting burned, he had to squeeze his shoulders together as best as he could. It was weird trying to move as an animal, but luckily he was getting better at getting used to the odd mechanisms that came from each organism. He could move as a hamster only a few hours after transforming this time, which was a new record for him! 

Dean slowly pushed himself through the bars. He braced himself in case something went wrong, such as him falling over completely and burning his entire body with the silver. Nothing happened, and he was able to keep his balance.

Dean: 1

Silver bars: 0

Nothing would stand in his way.

The cage was not high off the ground at all. The bottom of it was actually pressing close to the ground, and the ledge between it and the floor of the room was reachable by his tiny hamster claws. He only had to reach out and step onto the floor, and…

“Squeeee!” Dean squeaked in his tiny hamster voice as he fell back into his cage, barely managing to avoid the bars of the cage as he did so. His hands hurt like crazy now, and when he managed to take a look at them, he found that they were severely burnt.

Son of a bitch. The floor of the room was at least some part silver, if not all silver. His father had not been stupid enough to put him in a cage he could shrink down in and escape from. He put him somewhere it would actually be impossible for him to run out of without dying along the way. Dean was definitely too weak to be able to survive that much silver. He wasn’t even sure a stronger skinwalker would be able to make it through, and they were usually able to power through their silver bullets!

Plopping back down on the floor, Dean glared at the bars.

Dean: 0

Silver bars: 1

More hours passed of him staring at nothing and sleeping. He only had to go to the bathroom during the first day or so of being there (since he didn’t get any food after, of course), and the smell of it from the corner of the cage where he had to go reeked of something foul. It was worse than any normal poop.

At that point, about a week had passed without any sign of any human life around him. There had been a spider crawling across the room at one point (which Dean saw clearly with his new advanced vision), but it was of no help to him. It scurried on its way, probably back to its web that it had built somewhere inside. Maybe it had a family that loved it and was waiting for it to get back.

Or maybe it was a male spider about to get eaten by the female it promised itself to, betrayed just as Dean was.

At least it was less of a monster than Dean, even if many people were scared of it. 

By then, Dean managed to control his shifting a little bit. He couldn’t shift at will too many times in one day, but he could once or twice. He did not test this out too much, for it made him really uncomfortable. He thought about changing back into his human form for a moment, but he did not think he would be able to handle seeing himself like that. He was a creature now, and he did not deserve to look human.

Instead, he stayed in the form of a cat, as that was what he felt most comfortable as. It also took less energy out of him to be a smaller animal than a full sized human or even a dog. He could have chosen a small dog, but that would just have depressed him further. If he was going to be a dog, he would have wanted to be a big, strong one. So, a cat it was.

He slept, shook in fear from nightmares, and longed for food. He stared, dreamed of getting out of there, and meowed to himself with his hoarse voice. He whimpered in pain, avoided the silver, and thought long and hard about his life and family. He did everything a bored person without any sort of object around him would do.

Dean was still so, so bored.

And the hunger… it was so extreme. His stomach growled time and time again, begging for food. Dean did not want to think about the foods he knew it wanted, but luckily he himself had not been craving anything of the sort.

If he didn’t get any food soon, however, he would surely end up dead.

He was okay with that. He was ready to die now. Dean did not want to live in a world where he was locked up in a cage for the rest of his time. He did not want to sit there tortured for something that was not even his fault. He especially did not want to live in a world where his brother thought him dead and his father hated his guts. 

Dean was going to embrace death.

Of course, just as these thoughts came into his head, the door to the room opened.


	6. Chapter 6

The last thing Sam remembered was a skinwalker knocking his knife out of his hand and managing to push him back. There was no telling where the knife had gone in the moment, so he knew he had no hope of fighting back effectively. His gun was not in a well enough position for him to pull it out and start shooting. He got one glimpse of the creature bearing down over him from the ground before he passed out from hitting his head. 

Then, all was black. It hurt, but time flew by faster like this. There was no telling what was happening around him, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up from within the motel room they were staying in. His head hurt a lot, and part of him wished he had not woken up. However, with his memories coming back to him, he had to get up so that he could figure out what happened. 

When his eyes opened, he had to close them again because of how bright out it was. It was definitely a new day. Hopefully, it was the next day and Sam hadn’t lost much time. Blinking rapidly, trying to get his eyes used to the sudden light, Sam looked around his surroundings to see where his father and brother were.

All he found was John.

“Dad?” Sam asked, his voice coming out in one hoarse croak from just waking up. It sounded like it had been days since he last spoke, but he knew he couldn’t have been out that long. It must have been from when he hit his head. Maybe he screamed or something like that.

John turned towards Sam the moment he heard his voice. It looked like he had been working on something in his journal, probably the start of a new case. Them being there proved that they had beat the skinwalkers, so Sam assumed the case was over. The thought made him feel relieved. He did not like fighting those creatures, and he hoped he never had to ever again. He had been way too close for comfort with death.

“Sammy, you’re awake,” John said, coming over to check on him. “You hit your head pretty hard.”

“How long was I out?” Sam questioned.

“It has only been less than a day,” John told him. “You were lucky it wasn’t a harder hit. You will be fine in a few days, hopefully. I don’t believe you have a concussion, but you were passed out so it was hard to tell.”

Sam was grateful that it had only been a day or so. He did not like the idea of being knocked out for much longer than that.

“What happened after I passed out?” Sam asked. “How did we get away? Did we win?”

“Yeah, we won. Dean saved you from getting bit or killed, and I managed to kill off the last few. It seemed impossible, but we did it.”

It was silent as Sam processed everything. It was strange to think that he could have been more severely hurt if Dean had not been there to save him. He could be dead right now. He could have been turned. He didn’t remember seeing his brother coming for him, but even when passed out Sam was able to count on his brother. 

Dean saved him.

But… something was still not right.

“So where is Dean?” Sam asked. He figured his brother went out to get food or something like that. Sometimes, he liked to go find the best pie in the town wherever they went. Maybe he would come back with a pie that they could all share. He would be back soon, pie in hand, and ready to start teasing Sam for almost dying. He wanted to believe that everything was fine, but he had a horrible feeling in his gut that it wasn’t.

“Well, you see,”John said, looking awkward now, “your brother saved you when you got knocked out, but… he didn’t manage to save himself, Sam.”

A pause.

“What do you mean?” Sam asked. “He’s coming back, right? Did he get hurt? Is he in the hospital?”

“No, Sammy, I’m sorry. Your brother is dead.”

His heart dropped. 

Dead? His brother couldn’t be dead. Dean had gone through too much shit to end up dead like that. It was impossible. He was practically invincible.

But he wasn’t there, and Sam knew that Dean wouldn’t have left his side when he was injured like this. He would have begged John to go do any errands asked of him so he could watch over his brother and make sure his head didn’t cause him any more pain. He would have been right there next to him if he was okay.

Still, Sam did not want to believe it.

“You’re lying,” Sam accused, hoping this was a huge, sick joke. “Dean can’t be dead.”

“He’s dead, Sam,” John insisted, crossing his arms. He looked annoyed, which confused Sam. If he was dead like he claimed, shouldn’t he be sad instead of frustrated at him? Shouldn’t he be grieving his son?

“No!” Sam shouted. “He’s not! He wouldn’t just die like that all of a sudden! He’s stronger! He doesn’t deserve to die!”

“He’s dead!” John yelled back. “He’s dead, and he’s not coming back! Just accept it and move on!”

Sam opened his mouth to argue some more, but stopped when his father threw something on the bed next to him. He wanted to puke when he saw it. He wanted to curl up in a small space and cry for a while. 

“No,” Sam whispered. This could not be happening.

“He’s dead,” John said once again.

It was Dean’s necklace - the one that Sam gave to him that he never took off. There was no way Dean would ever go without wearing it. It was covered in what Sam could only assume was Dean’s blood. It was newly dried, and Sam knew it would be hard to scrub off.

He would surely try later anyway.

“Do you even care that he died?” Sam asked, his voice a whisper. Normally, he would be scared to ask his father such a question in fear of setting off his temper. Now, though, he wanted the argument that came with his temper. John let Dean die and didn’t even seem to care that he was gone. What kind of father did that? Sam needed to understand. 

“Of course I care, but we can’t focus on that right now. We need to find a new case as soon as possible,” John said, turning to head back over to where he was doing work before Sam woke up. Sam noticed that newspapers covered the desk, and Sam could only guess at what crazy stories each contained. 

“If you cared, you wouldn’t be sitting there doing another case instead of mourning,” Sam said. “You don’t give a shit.”

The shouting began once more.

“He was my son!” John yelled. “I would be cruel not to care!”

“Then I guess you’re cruel because you’re not showing an ounce of remorse towards your son being murdered by the monsters you took him to go fight! He saved me, dad! He died making sure I would live, and you can’t even bother to care that he’s gone now! You’re sitting there trying to find a new case when we need to go out there and find a way to bring him back!”

“It’s impossible to bring him back! If there was a way to do so, I would try, but there’s nothing we can do! And don’t you dare accuse me of not caring! Just because I don’t go around crying over everything like you do doesn’t mean I don’t care! Dean would want us to keep going and do our job! So suck it up!”

Sam was sobbing at this point, devastated by not having his brother with him anymore. He was already missing him immensely, and he did not understand how his dad could not be breaking down right now too. Dean was never coming back. What did John not understand about that?

“Did you even try to look for a way to bring him back?” Sam asked. 

“I don’t need to,” John said. “I know there isn’t anything that can do that.”

“Oh, so you know everything there is to know about the universe now? We just need to do some research. Maybe we can find somebody to do some sort of spell over his body or-”

“No,” John interrupted him. “We can’t. There’s. Nothing. We. Can. Do. Besides, I already salted and burned the body. There is not a body for him to return to even if some way magically appeared.”

Sam felt despair fill his entire being. “You didn’t even wait for me to wake up before you burned his body? Why?”

“Why does it matter?”

“I didn’t get to say one last goodbye to him…”

“Just do it now.”

“But it’s not the same.”

John was obviously done with him now. “That is not my problem! We have a job to do, and we are going to do it. Now, I am going to go find us a new case, you are going to sit here silently and let your head heal, and then we are going to go off and fight some monsters without thinking about your brother. Get. Over. It.”

And with that, John turned away from him to go back to checking over newspaper clippings and writing in his journal, ignoring Sam’s presence. Sam knew it would only end worse if he kept up the argument. 

Sam picked up Dean’s necklace from where it laid on the bed, not wanting to let it go abandoned any longer. The blood made him feel more sick than he already felt, but he did not let that stop him from holding it close. The blood was dry, anyway. Later, he would stick it under some hot water in the bathroom and soap it up as much as he dared, but it would never truly hold that same light and shine it did before. 

It wouldn’t bring Sam any happiness when he saw it around Dean’s neck anymore. Now, it would only hold sadness as he stared at it and remembered how just yesterday he had an older brother, alive and well. 

Sam placed the necklace around his neck. Dean spent years wearing it, letting Sam know that he loved him just by treasuring the gift he gave him. Now, Sam would wear it forever in remembrance of his brother.

Curling up on the bed, his head in pain and his heart hurting worse, Sam let himself cry into his pillow as he went back to sleep. All the while, he clutched the amulet’s charm in his hands, trying to keep it warm. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys didn't mind a chapter in Sam's point of view. There will be a few more in the future from his perspective.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to say that I have been reading all of your comments and that they all make me incredibly happy. I'm bad at responding to comments, but I do appreciate them very much. I'm so happy that you guys are enjoying this fic so far, and I hope this chapter is just as good! Enjoy!

Dean had been dead for a week.

Dean had been dead for a week, and Sam could already tell that he was never going to get over it.

Dean had been dead for a week, and all Sam wanted to do was die with him.

But John would never allow that.

Sam felt like he couldn’t do anything with his life at the moment. John had found a new case, and they had driven to a new motel to work it, but Sam did not feel like helping on this one. He laid in his bed, twisting Dean’s necklace in his hand, and stared at the wall. 

“Get up,” John demanded when he was ready to go out and hunt.

Sam did not respond.

“I will not put up with this,” John said. “You are going to get up, and you are going to suck it up and fight with me.”

Sam turned to glare at him, not bothering to get up off the bed. “It’s a ghost. It’s not that hard. You can do it on your own.”

John began to shout at him, but Sam did not fight back. Usually, the two of them would end up in a screaming fight for one reason or another, and by the end, it was Dean that had to break them up. Dean wasn’t there, though, and that made Sam feel worse. He did not feel like fighting with his father right now. He did not feel like doing anything.

Luckily, John left without him. Sam knew he would have to deal with his father being pissed at him when he got back, but for now, he let himself be drawn into the darkness. It would probably only be a few hours before John returned, but that was a few hours to be alone in his thoughts without having to worry about the man trying to force him to do things. He could cry on his own right now.

Of course, those few hours turned to more than a day. Sam didn’t notice how much time had passed as he was stuck in his own head. When he did look up to actually get some food real quick, he saw that it was the afternoon of the next day. 

His father was still not back.

...

Dean was so hungry. He couldn’t move without feeling like his stomach was churning in its need for food. His body itched to escape this cage so that he could go hunt for some food.

His mind longed to die off so he could control that need to hunt.

The knowledge that he could go hunt anything he desired if he got out scared him. Who knew what kind of thing he would hunt. A deer? Sure. A human? The thought made him want to puke more than the hunger pains did.

There weren’t any windows in the room he was trapped in, so he had no clue how much time had passed. It had to have been at least a week, but from how out of it he was from the pain, a month or more could have gone by without him noticing. He didn’t know enough about skinwalkers to know how long they could go without food. With the amount of pain he was in now, though, he had to guess that a newly turned one would not last much longer than he had so far. 

He hoped he was about to die. He wished with all of his heart that his suffering would end soon and that he could leave the torture John probably had planned. 

Too bad Dean had never been that lucky.

Dean could barely look up when the door to the room opened for the first time since he was left there. He could hear footsteps as whoever it was came closer. When he could see who it was, he was horrified to see that it was John.

John did not look surprised when he came in to see that Dean was no longer in his human form. Even the thought of being in a form that could communicate with John if he were to try and force him made him feel sicker. No, instead, Dean was in the form of a black cat. He was a cat because that was what he felt most comfortably as now. It was specifically a black one so that he could pretend he was blending into the darkness where he wouldn’t be seen by anybody ever again.

Well, he probably was already not going to be seen by anybody but John ever again, but it still made him feel a little bit better.

“I’m glad to see that you’re still alive,” John said. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you died, I guess, but it’s more fun this way. At least now I can study your kind.”

John dropped some kind of package on the ground right outside of the cage. The moment the smell from it hit Dean’s nose, his head jerked up as fast as it could (which, granted, was not very fast). There was obviously meat in the bag. The scent of blood permeated the air, hitting his nostrils and making them flare. It smelled so good, and Dean wanted nothing more than to devour whatever was in the bag.

He’d take anything at this point.

Well, almost everything.

For what he could tell, the meat did not smell like it was human. Though, he did not currently have good judgement since his nose had newly stronger senses and he did not know what a dead human would smell like in his new state. 

Thankfully, John decided to explain to him what was in the bag, putting him at ease.

“Don’t think that I will be feeding into your horrid appetite,” John said. “You may be a monster, but I will not allow you to fall deeper into evil, and I definitely will not become a monster myself by hunting humans for you. You will strictly eat deer like this one or whatever else I decide will do.”

This was good. Dean felt better about eating animals since he did that as a human too. Sure, he mostly ate hamburgers, but whatever animal John brought him would be better than eating a human. 

Dean would not lose the last of his humanity. 

John pushed the bag so that it was right up against the bars outside of the cage, but he did not move it inside with him. Dean stared at him, wondering what was going on. Wasn’t he there to force him to eat? Why wasn’t he giving him the food?

“Don’t look at me like that,” John said. “If you want the food, you’re going to have to come get it yourself. I’m not going to be doing you any favors. I’m already hunting for you!”

Dean debated ignoring the food and going with his initial plan of starving himself to death. However, his stomach growled and sent pains throughout his body, and he knew he would not be able to go through with it. The silver around him might hurt, but the hunger made it so much worse. He thought himself a coward for not being able to let himself die, but he did not care too much at the moment. He needed that food.

Dean dragged himself over to the edge of the cage, trying his best to not touch the bars. He did good until he had to reach his paw out to try and bat at the bag in order to pull it in. His legs hit the silver a few times, burning him and making him hiss lowly. His broken yowls went ignored by John as he just watched Dean struggle to get the food.

It took a long time, but eventually Dean managed to get the bag in enough for him to get to the food without hurting himself on the silver too much. He immediately began scarfing down everything in sight, ripping the meat off the bones with no regards to the mess it made. 

As he was eating, Dean suddenly picked up what had to have been the heart of the deer. He stared at it for a moment, contemplating if it was worth it, but ultimately decided that that was the part that he actually needed to eat the most in order to satisfy his new biology. He closed his eyes, bringing the heart closer to his lips, and took a bite. He shuddered at the texture, but he found that he quite liked the taste.

He hated that he liked the taste.

The food was gone moments later. Dean had eaten faster than he had ever eaten before. The meat immediately made him feel physically better. He felt like he could move despite the pain a lot easier now, and even his thoughts seemed to be clearer. 

“You will get a meal once a week,” John told him when he was finished eating. “I will tell Sam that I am going out to research a case and come here to bring you meat, but don’t expect anything else from me. I am only keeping you alive so that I can see how your kind will survive without human meat. You’re lucky that I decided to keep you alive in the first place.”

Yeah, Dean felt sooooooo lucky to be alive and kept in a cage.

Speaking of cages…

“I’ve also decided that that cage is not a suitable place for you,” John said. Dean felt some hope fill him. Was John going to let him out of the cage? Maybe he would just keep him in this strange building and make it so he couldn’t escape the place. He would be much happier with more space to move around in even if he would still be a prisoner.

Dean knew that would be too good to be true, though.

“I found a great alternative for you to stay in while on my way here.”

John went out to the hallway only to come back in carrying an even smaller silver barred cage than the one he was in now. He set it up on the silver coated floor next to him, making sure it was not near anything Dean could get a hold of to escape and avoid the silver. He opened the door to that cage before carefully opening the door to the cage that Dean was in. He grabbed Dean before he could brace himself to try and run, and then John practically threw him into the smaller cage. Dean was too slow to fight back as he was sent flying into the edge of the silver of the cage, his skin immediately starting to sizzle.

Dean forced himself into the center of the cage as fast as he could, but there was nowhere near as much space for him to avoid the silver as the old cage had. His tale hit the cage at every swing, forcing him to keep it still no matter how much it cramped. He couldn’t move at all without hitting some part of his body to the cage. It wasn’t so cramped that he was pressed up against all sides of the cage, but it would still not be easy to turn himself without hurting himself more.

It was absolutely miserable. He would have to resign to his fate of only being able to lay in boredom and pain for the rest of his life.

John made sure the door was locked before simply leaving without another word from Dean. Dean was sort of happy that the man hadn’t stayed to talk.

He didn’t want an audience to this ongoing pain.

Dean tried to turn into a smaller animal so that he could have more space, but he found that even with the new energy from the food he had just eaten that he could not transform. He was still way too weak to use any of his shapeshifting powers.

If this was what he felt like now, then Dean dreaded to know how he would feel if John kept him alive for years.

...

John returned to the hotel hours later to a confused Sam asking what took him so long.

“Oh, it was nothing,” John said, surprising Sam with the fact that he was not angry like he thought he would be. “The ghost’s remains were hard to locate since the body had been moved at some point, but I finally found it. The case is done.”

Sam accepted this as an answer before going back to staring at the wall and mourning his brother.

John never told him that the case only took a fraction of the time he was gone.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I went a lot longer with this chapter than I planned and even changed their world a lot more than I intended. I kind of hate how this chapter plays out, but it is the only way I can make myself write it to make it make a little bit of sense in my head. Sorry if it's bad.

The moment Sam turned eighteen, he ran. He ran as far as he could away from John, making sure not to leave any trail for him to follow. After years of arguing, screaming matches, and even on occasion actual fist fights, Sam was too eager to get away from John’s side. The man could no longer call himself a father figure to him. Sam stopped calling him “dad” years ago.

The only person Sam kept in contact with that was connected to John was Bobby. The elder hunter was more of a father to him than John ever was. He took Sam in for a short while after Dean’s death when John got sick of Sam’s moping and refusal to help on any hunt. Bobby mourned with Sam, for Dean was also like a son to him, and the two helped each other heal from the experience as best as they could. Even now, Sam still cried over his brother, but Bobby made it easier. Just because he ran from his father did not mean he had to abandon his relationship with Bobby as well. Bobby even promised him that he would not rat out his location to his father.

Not that John cared much to ask.

Sam thought about quitting the hunting life to go to school. He even applied to some colleges and met up with some people his age that were looking for possible roommates. Despite all of this, he found that the more “normal” life was not as great as he thought it would be. Even as he went out with some potential friends and looked at college options, he found that he was always itching to go back out and hunt. 

He found that he could not stop thinking about whether it was possible to bring Dean back.

Sure, John told him years ago that it was impossible. He said that he had thought of everything that they could try, but none of it would work. Sam wasn’t convinced. He knew John was a shitty parent. It wouldn’t surprise him if John didn’t try a single thing and just let Dean die without a care in the world.

So, Sam once again left the life he was creating himself. He forgot about his old plans of attending college, getting a girlfriend, and living a domestic life. Instead, he went back to his old ways of fake identities, credit cards, and all that jazz to get back into hunting. He used what his father taught him to do more good than John ever did. While John focused more on finding the yellow eyed demon, Sam put his work into actually helping more people while also researching ways of possibly bringing his brother back during his free time.

Sam did a good job of avoiding his father over the next few years. He only ran into the man once, and it was obvious to him that John wasn’t even looking in the first place. The two immediately began arguing, much like they had when Sam was under his care. Both yelled spiteful things, and even though the two were filled with hate, John still had the audacity to ask for Sam’s help in hunting the yellow eyed demon.

Of course, Sam told him to fuck off. John could fight the demon by himself.

The two parted ways again. John never asked how Sam was doing on his own or what he was getting up to. Sam didn’t reveal that he was making a name for himself in the hunting community as being one of the best - even better than his father. He also did not tell him that he was trying to track down a way to get to Dean.

He first started researching spells. He looked through every book he could find for a spell that could bring back the dead. There were many on how to create zombie-like beings, but those were not the same. He wanted his brother back as he was, not as a zombie. Sam threatened every witch he came across in his hunts, sometimes even ending up begging them for the information that he needed.

None of them could help him. They even mocked him for trying, especially after how long he’d been dead and how he had no body.

He killed every single one.

After so many failed attempts, Sam began to get more desperate. He was sick of being questioned by everybody. Everyone he went to for help asked him why he even bothered trying. They wanted to know why he wanted his brother back when he had been gone for so many years.

They didn’t understand. Sam didn’t bother trying to explain to them. They obviously haven't had a strong brotherly bond with their siblings as he had. They couldn’t see how lost he was without his brother. 

One day, Sam did what he didn’t think he would ever stoop to. He went to a crossroads, and he attempted to make a deal with a demon.

“Sam Winchester,” the crossroads demon said when she answered his call. Sam wasn’t even sure that summoning her would work, but it was even more surprising when she did while already knowing who he was.

“You know my name,” Sam stated the obvious.

“We all know your name, Sam,” the demon said. “You’re infamous for hunting. It’s every demon’s goal to be the one to finally kill you.”

“And are you here to kill me?”

“Not necessarily. You’re here with intentions of making a deal, I assume. If I can be the one to get you in a deal and claim your soul, then I will have won.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Whatever, you might get that wish if you can help me bring my brother back.”

The demon groaned. “This shit again? All I ever hear about you is that you’re either killing things or looking for a spell to make your brother alive again. I was hoping you’d give me something I can actually work with, but I guess not.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked. 

“I mean that it’s impossible. I can’t help you even if I wanted to.”

“But it has to be possible somehow!” Sam protested.

“Not everything is possible!” The demon shouted at him, obviously annoyed. “Even if it was, I wouldn’t know how. Nobody would be able to. None of us know where Dean’s soul is.”

“What?” Sam asked, his heart dropping.

“Well, it’s not in Hell, obviously. It’s possible that they’re hiding it in Heaven, but-”

“Wait, wait, wait, who could be hiding him in Heaven? I didn’t even know there was an actual, physical Heaven.”

The demon froze when she realized that she revealed too much information. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not allowed to talk about that. It could get me killed.”

“Not telling me could get you killed right now.”

“Oh yeah? How so?”

“I could kill you myself.”

The demon gave Sam a disbelieving look. Sam opened his mouth to make another threat, but a second later, the demon disappeared, not giving him a chance to think about killing her. Summoning her was another dead end.

A dead end that destroyed the last bit of hope that Sam had of getting his brother back.

After that conversation, Sam fell into another depression, just like he did when Dean first died. He didn’t feel like hunting for a while. He barely ate, lost sleep, and started to regret letting his hopes get up in the first place. The only difference between now and then was that he didn’t have John yelling at him this time. 

When he did force himself to go out and hunt again, he started small. He went after a few simple ghosts before moving up to bigger cases like he was used to. Hunting did make him feel better, and soon he was doing his best to forget about trying to bring back his brother. When he did let himself think about what could have been, he made sure it was not when he was facing down a werewolf or a nest of vampires. He only did that in the dead of night when he was about to go to sleep.

During one of his hunts with what he originally thought was going to be some type of ghost or witch, Sam ran into a strange creature he had never fought before. He never heard John talk about anything like it when he was younger, either. Frankly, he was very confused about the whole situation. The things this being could do mystified him because they did not seem possible. They shouldn’t have been able to be done by even the most powerful of witches.

He called Bobby for help, and he was told that he was dealing with a trickster. 

When Sam went to confront this trickster, he found that he was attracted to this man. It baffled him because he was used to never looking at another being with any sort of feelings since all he could ever think about was how much he hated being with his father, trying to get his brother back, or hunting. He didn’t allow himself to think about romance, yet here was a man who wasn’t even human that made him suddenly want to drop to his knees and surrender to him.

He didn’t do that, though. He couldn’t allow the trickster to go around killing anyone. Sam would have to kill this wonderfully attractive man. The following day, Sam trapped the trickster, killed him, and went along his merry way. It was the end of that case.

Or so he thought.

A month later, the day after Sam briefly reminded himself that he was now twenty two and a year had gone by since he let himself remember he was twenty one and legally allowed to drink, he ran into another trickster. Except, it wasn’t another one; it was the  _ same _ trickster.

“I thought I killed you,” Sam said as he pinned the trickster to the wall with a wooden stake pressed against his neck.

“You thought wrong, buckaroo,” the trickster said, a grin on his face despite being in danger. “I can’t believe you thought you could kill me. I am the trickster.”

“But why didn’t it kill you? I watched you die. I made sure I knew how to kill you.”

“If only you had stabbed the real me. You got tricked, Sam. It was an illusion.”

And just like that, the figure he had pinned against the wall dissolved in front of his eyes. Soon, Sam was clutching at air, the fake trickster no longer in his grasp. Turning around, Sam tried to find where he actually was, but before he could think about catching him for real, he was the one being pinned. Sam might have been taller than the trickster, but he was definitely the weaker of the two. He was easily trapped, and he wasn’t able to escape as the trickster sneered at him.

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” the trickster said. “You don’t stand a chance against me. You never have and you never will.”

“There is a way to kill everything,” Sam told him. “You might be able to trick me, but I will get you one day. I will stop you from hurting innocents.”

“There isn’t any innocent blood on my hands, Sammy-”

“Don’t call me that.”

“-but of course you wouldn’t believe that. You believe what you want, and if that means you believe that you know how to kill me, then go on and think that. You’re wrong, but whatever.”

“How am I wrong?” Sam asked. “This is how you kill a trickster, and you are… you’re a trickster, right?”

The maybe-trickster shrugged at him before disappearing. Sam looked around him, but he could not find the man anywhere.

So it was possible that the trickster was not a trickster. That made this even harder. Even calling Bobby and talking through the weird interaction with him gave him no answers. Bobby didn’t know what was going on either.

This entire situation did not make any sense. 

Sam now had a new case to go looking into: the identity of the trickster and why the fuck the world seemed to be so wrong. However, this was harder than trying to bring his brother back. Both seemed impossible, but at least he knew what he was looking for with Dean’s case. This time, he had no idea what to research. Everything he looked up either brought more information about tricksters or other things that were impossible for the not-trickster to be. Regarding the world being wrong, all he could think of was that somehow a spell was placed upon everybody, but even that did not make sense. 

Everybody else thought the world was fine.

Well, everybody but other creatures.

See, once Sam began to notice how weird the world felt, he began to notice other things too during his hunts. The monsters he fought would say odd things that before would not have made sense, but now they just added to the fuzziness that was Sam’s head.

“You weren’t the one that was supposed to kill me,” one ghost said right before he burned the body.

“There’s supposed to be two,” a wendigo once said to him.

“This feels wrong,” a vampire said. “Wasn’t I meant to fight someone else?”

Those were just the tip of the iceberg. Once, a human even told him that he felt like he was supposed to be interrogating somebody else when he was questioning Sam about a shapeshifter case. 

Sam was always left with more questions than answers. He sometimes tried to ask what the creatures meant, but they looked just as confused as he was whenever they spouted that nonsense. Then, they would try to kill him again, and he was forced to kill them first.

It wasn’t until he found a case dealing with another demon that everything was answered. By this time, Sam had the colt, but he hadn’t used it yet. He wanted it to be a surprise for whatever demon he had to deal with in the future.

Apparently, he would use it against the very one he had been avoiding in order to not risk running into his father again.

The yellow eyed demon.

When Sam started the case, he did not expect that the yellow eyed demon was the one he was going to have to fight. The information he gathered from victims’ families simply pointed to some random demon coming to collect souls from deals from the past. Instead, he ran into the yellow eyed demon trying to find those that he bled into in their youth.

And he was trying to lure Sam there because he was one of them. 

John was nowhere in sight, which made Sam happy. He did not want to have to deal with his father at the same time as fighting the demon that killed his mother. Sam didn’t even want to have to be fighting this demon. It should be John that was up against him. This was his fight, yet here Sam was instead. Sam couldn’t just leave it, though. He had to defeat him before he killed anyone else.

The yellow eyed demon thought he defeated Sam. He thought he had him in his grasp, that his soul was his. Too bad for him, Sam had his one last trick up his sleeve. 

“You’re mine,” the yellow eyed demon said to him.

“No,” Sam said, pointing the colt at him. “You’re dead.”

“Shit,” the yellow eyed demon said, shocked to find that Sam found the one thing that would kill him. Sam went to pull the trigger, but the demon tried one more trick to stop him. “Wait, don’t you want to find out why the world isn’t right? Why your life feels wrong?”

Sam paused. “What? You know why?”

“Well, of course,” the demon said. “I know exactly why. It has to do with your family, so why wouldn’t I know?”

Sam wanted to know the answer to that question so badly. He wanted to know why nothing felt right in his life anymore, but he wanted this demon dead even more. 

“No, I don’t care,” Sam told him. “I’m killing you.”

“It has to do with your brother!”

Sam hesitated once again. “Dean? Dean is dead.”

“But that’s just it, isn’t it? Dean being out of the picture is exactly what’s wrong!”

“Why?”

“Maybe if you put the gun down and agree to join me, you’ll find out.”

Without thinking about it any longer, Sam shot him right in the chest. He was not playing around, and there was no way he would even consider helping that demon with any plan he had with him. The yellow eyed demon fell back, a shocked look on his face, and ended up dead on the floor. 

Sam burned the body and then left him there. He did not tell anybody what happened. He didn’t even try to reach out to tell John that the yellow eyed demon was dead. John could keep searching for all he cared. It was futile now, and Sam did not particularly care whether or not John spent the rest of his life trying to find a demon that was long dead. All Sam cared about was how he was getting closer to finding the answers he was searching for, yet he was also so, so far.

How was Dean the reason this weird feeling kept coming over him? He had been dead for years, so why was his death at fault for this wrongness?

He kept searching, and weeks later, he finally found the answer.

It was the not-trickster that gave him his answer.

Sam hadn’t even been hunting him when they ran into each other next. In fact, it was the not-trickster that came to him! Sam was eating at a diner, his plate full of a healthy salad, when time suddenly stopped all around him. Looking up, Sam found the not-trickster and another unfamiliar man sitting across the table from him. This other man was wearing a long trench coat, had a serious look on his face, and did not seem to fit in the atmosphere of the diner. Neither of them did, but at least Sam was used to seeing the not-trickster. This new person just confused him even more.

“What’s going on?” Sam asked as he lowered the fork he held, for he had been about to take a bite of his salad when the world froze. 

“We need to talk,” the not-trickster said. 

“I figured when you came here and didn’t immediately attack me. What do we need to talk about?”

“My brother here and I had a huge fight with our family over how this world is turning out,” the not-trickster began to explain. “See, I was in hiding, but when I noticed things start to go very wrong, I went back to see what was up. Turns out, this was supposed to be the main timeline of all the worlds our dad created. It was supposed to be his favorite one. However, your family fucked it up because of the free will he gave all of creation.”

“Ummmm,” Sam was very confused, “what? I don’t understand what you are talking about.”

“You’ve neglected to explain things properly, Gabriel,” the man in the trench coat spoke up.

“Hold up, Gabriel?” Sam asked. “You have a name?”

“Duh,” the not-tric, oops, Gabriel said.

“Please explain what is going on.”

“Yes, well, my name is Castiel,” the man in the trench coat said, “and this is my brother, Gabriel. We are angels of the Lord.”

Sam stared at them in disbelief. “Angels? You’re kidding right? Angels don’t exist.”

“What, demons exist, but angels can’t? Demons are the followers of Lucifer, who is an angel, yet you can’t believe angels are real too?” Gabriel asked. “I am literally the archangel Gabriel. The only reason I was pretending to be a trickster was so that I could stay on Earth without my family finding me. I was sick of their arguing, and I wanted to escape.”

“Okay, say that I believed you,” Sam said, “why are you revealing yourselves to me now? What does this have to do with my family ‘fucking up the timeline’ or whatever you said.”

“You see,” Castiel said, “God created a lot of different worlds with similar people. There are many other worlds with the Winchesters, for example, all slightly different in one way or another. However, the plan for this world was big, and your family managed to ruin God’s plans when you were just children.”

“You and your brother were supposed to fight many battles together,” Gabriel said. “The two of you were going to stop a lot of bad things from happening and even eventually kill each other in an epic final battle.”

“But Dean died,” Sam guessed, “and that changed everything.”

“Yes, Heaven did not foresee your father letting Dean die. And now, none of the battles will play out and all of the plans God had are ruined. He has moved onto another world, and all of the angels have given up on their original plans on being part of the battles that were going to take place. Most of them went with Father to mess with other timelines despite not being part of those timelines.”

“Okay, so we don’t have to worry about a bunch of world ending battles. Sure, my brother being gone hurts like Hell, but how is that a problem?” Sam asked.

“Oh, it’s not a problem for you humans,” Castiel said.

“But for those of us angels that stayed because we don’t care about the other timelines? We’re bored,” Gabriel admitted.

“Bored?” Sam repeated back to them.

“Extremely,” Castiel agreed. “I spent years trying to find our Father just for him to come back and say we’re leaving this world to do whatever humans want with it. He no longer wants to influence it. As Gabriel said, only a few stayed. Most of the angels who didn’t leave with God are doing their own things to run Heaven smoothly for this timeline. Others are coming to live their lives on Earth, just as Gabriel and I want to.”

“You want to live on Earth?”

“I already was,” Gabriel said, “but I need to shake my life up a bit, and little Castiel here has never seen technology or anything else on Earth before. He’s my favorite little brother, so I decided that he could stick with me, and then we both decided that we want to become hunters.”

That shocked Sam more than he already was. “Hunters? Why would you guys want to become hunters? And why are you telling me all of this?”

“It sounds fun,” Gabriel shrugged.

“And you’re one of the best,” Castiel said. “We figured that you could teach us and let us hunt with you. Gabriel already likes you, and I’ll trust you if he does.”

Sam felt his cheeks redden at that. Gabriel liked him? Even platonic love made him feel giddy.

“So what do you say?” Gabriel asked. “Wanna let us join your team?”

Sam pretended to think over the matter, but he knew having angels on his side to help him in hunts would make everything so much easier. He would have somebody on his side to keep him from all of the near death situations he had been through. So, Sam agreed.

They became a team of hunters, and they were even better together than when Sam hunted alone.


	9. Chapter 9

The topic of Dean came up quickly in their new friendship. Sam couldn’t help but remember the conversation he had with the crossroads demon when he was searching for a way to bring him back. According to that demon, Dean’s soul could not be found by any being in Hell, but there was a possibility that the angels might have some clue as to what was going on. They did talk about how Dean dying was the reason this timeline got messed up. Perhaps they knew where he was, and then maybe he could beg them to somehow bring him back. God already left their timeline. It wouldn’t matter now if more things were messed up by bringing Dean back to life, right?

So, one day a few weeks after they first teamed up, Sam gathered his courage and asked the angels the question that had been on his mind for so long.

“Hey, guys?” Sam started when they were in the middle of researching a case. 

“Yeah, what’s up, buddy?” Gabriel asked.

Sam didn’t know how he was going to phrase his question. After a moment of hesitation, he decided to man up and just say it.

“Do you know where my brother is?” Sam asked.

“What do you mean?” Castiel questioned, confused.

“Well, the demons I’ve fought have said that he isn’t in Hell, which is good, but that means he has to be in Heaven, right?” 

The angels were silent. They stared at Sam, thoughtful looks on their faces, before answering.

“No,” Castiel said, “we don’t know where Dean’s soul is.”

Sam squinted at them. “How do you not know where he is? He has to be in Heaven. You even said his death was the reason for this timeline failing God’s plans. Surely all of you angels would know where he was so that you could confirm that he was really gone.”

“See,” Gabriel said, “that situation is complicated.”

“Complicated how?”

“None of us angels have ever actually seen Dean in Heaven. We know he’s there because God told us that he was, but we have never even gotten a glimpse of him before.”

“So how do you know that he wasn’t lying to you?” Sam asked.

“Because he abandoned the timeline. If Dean wasn’t permanently dead, don’t you think daddy dearest would have brought him back and continued with his plans? The angels think that he hid his soul from us so that we couldn’t try to send him back to Earth and mess up the world even more.”

“Okay,” Sam said, thinking it over, “why did he wait so long to leave then? Why stay when he knew the timeline was fucked?”

“He probably wanted to see what would happen anyway,” Castiel said. “He even disappeared on us for a while. I did mention that I went searching for him when we first met, right? That’s because he went missing, which I guess was because he was scoping out how the rest of the world was going before deciding to move on.”

“Huh,” Sam sighed, disappointed in their answer. He was hoping they would have had more answers to that, but it didn’t look like the angels would be much help in getting the knowledge he seeked. Perhaps it really was impossible. Still, he had to try one last time. “Couldn’t you go up there and look for him now that God is gone? You could find Dean’s soul and bring him to Earth again.”

“We’d have to get clearance from the angels running Heaven now,” Castiel said.

“But we can try soon,” Gabriel added. “Let’s focus on this case for now, and when we get a chance in the future when those angels aren’t as busy as they are, we’ll ask them for a favor to search for his soul. Interacting with our family one last time won’t hurt if it means getting Dean back.”

“Thank you,” Sam said, appreciating his new friends. He was glad these two were in his life now. They made it a lot less boring. They were good company and made him feel so much better about the losses he had experienced in his life. Plus, they were giving him hope again, something he hadn’t felt in so long.

Over the next few weeks, the three of them became closer as they learned about each other’s lives. Sam told them all about how bad of a father John was and what he remembered about Dean. Gabriel and Castiel told him all about their angel family and what it was like up in Heaven. During that time, Sam found that he sort of liked Gabriel in more of a romantic way. Sure, Castiel was fun to talk to, but when he got to be alone with Gabriel? He felt so happy. However, he was scared of telling the angel because he didn’t know if they were even capable of liking humans like that. He also didn’t want Castiel to feel like a third wheel in their team.

It was Gabriel that changed all that, though. 

“Castiel and I have been talking about something personal for me,” Gabriel told Sam one day while the three of them were driving home from a case. Sam had his own, more modern day car. It wasn’t anything like the Impala, but it got them to where they needed to go, so he couldn’t complain.

“Oh?” Sam asked, curious as to what Gabriel was trying to lead to.

And that’s when Gabriel explained to Sam that he had fallen in love with him. They talked it over, revealing that Sam felt the same way and talked about his insecurities about the situation. Gabriel thought it was funny that he was so worried about it, but he reassured him that he was completely capable of feelings. Castiel even said that he did not feel like a third wheel because he knew that they still cared about him as a brother and friend. It would be awkward when they were more lovey towards each other, but he would survive. He just wanted them to be happy.

So, Sam ended up with an angel boyfriend. His teenage, college oriented self would have never seen that coming. He barely ever thought about his sexuality before. He assumed he’d end up with a girl one day if hunting didn’t completely consume his life, but here he was: dating a male angel. 

He was 100% okay with that. 

...

The only downside to their new relationship was that they had to get two motel rooms every time they went somewhere for a case. Sam and Gabriel were beginning to be a lot more physical, and Castiel did not want to be near that if he could help it. He would get his own room so that he did not have to accidentally walk in on the two kissing or more.

The three of them had just checked into a new motel and were settling in when Castiel came knocking at Sam and Gabriel’s door. Opening it up, they let the angel in, assuming from the newspaper in his hand that he was going to start talking about the case.

“Have you read this?” Castiel asked.

“The newspaper? I’ve read one before, yes, but you’re going to have to be a little more specific,” Gabriel said.

“There’s an article in it about John Winchester.”

“What?” Sam asked. “Let me see.”

Castiel handed the newspaper to Sam. It was already folded to the page of the article. It was short, but the length did not make it any less shocking. 

**Man Arrested for Murder**

_ Police followed leads to the investigation of the local murders that have been happening lately. They say they found a man pretending to also be looking into the case. After loads of searching and interrogation, it was determined that this man, John Winchester, was behind the murders. Police don’t know exactly how he pulled them off, but they say they have enough evidence to convict him of murder, forging fake ids and credit cards, and possession of many deadly weapons. It is unlikely that this man will be getting out of jail anytime soon. _

“Did he really kill all those people?” Gabriel asked, having read the article over Sam’s shoulder.

“No, he’s an ass, but he wouldn’t do that,” Sam said. “Is this the paper from this town today?”

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“Then I think he went looking into the murders like we were about to do and ended up screwing himself over and getting blamed for them instead. To be honest, I like the idea of him being in jail, so I don’t think it’s necessary for us to do anything about it. Let’s just finish the case he couldn’t and get out of here before we end up being accused of being his accomplices somehow.”

“So leave John Winchester in jail after he helped ruin this timeline? I like the sound of that,” Gabriel said.

“I thought you didn’t care about all of the timeline crap?” Sam asked.

“I don’t, but it still sounds like a good idea.”

“Maybe we should visit him,” Castiel said.

Sam tilted his head at him. “And why would we do that?”

“Well, he’s not going to have access to any of his stuff anymore. I’m sure the cops are going to keep his weapons and other things they consider illegal, but they might let us take some of his supplies if you can prove that you’re his son.”

“I could get the Impala,” Sam realized. He may have hated his father, but Dean loved that car, and if he could get the car that his brother so adored, he would be happy. “Let’s do it.”

“Wait, wasn’t Sam arrested once during one of his cases? Wouldn’t they have that on record somewhere and not let you take anything because you were considered a criminal?” Gabriel asked. 

“No, I got all of that worked out a while ago,” Sam said. “The police no longer want me arrested wherever I go. They’ll likely not know me at all.”

So, they took a trip to where John was being held. They requested to retrieve John’s belongings that they didn’t require keeping for their investigation, but they denied wanting to talk to John. Sam provided the right documents to show that he was his son, and the police believed him without question. They seemed very eager to get rid of the Impala. They told him to take care, stay out of trouble, and let him go.

Frankly, Sam didn’t think they were doing a great job. He figured they would refuse giving him anything of John’s since they would want as much evidence as possible, but they gave up the car John drove around in to him way too easily. He wasn’t complaining, but it made him glad that he didn’t live in this town of inadequate police-work. 

Looking into the trunk of the car, Sam found that all of the guns, knives, and other weapons had been confiscated. The salt and holy water that John kept were the only things left, along with his journal. That was fine. Sam had his own supply, and once they were at the motel (Sam driving the Impala and the angels taking his other car back), they hid the cars by an alley and transferred his own items from his modern car to the Impala. Sam decided to leave the modern car in the motel parking lot, not caring much to do anything with it. 

They were still going through what was left in the car when Gabriel found something interesting in the glove box.

“Hey, Sammy,” Gabriel called out. Normally, Sam hated when people called him Sammy since that was his brother’s nickname for him, but he made an exception for Gabriel. “Do you know what this unlocks?”

Gabriel held up a key that was tucked deep under all of the fake ids, papers, and other miscellaneous items stuffed in the glove box. Sam came over to take a look at it, holding it up close to his eyes to see the design on it.

“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“Looks pretty old,” Gabriel pointed out.

“Yeah, very old. Let me see if I can find anything else in the glove box that could tell us what this belongs to.”

Sam took over going through the glove box. He threw away all of the fake ids he found, not needing anything with his father’s face on it. There were many fake credit cards too, which he threw away as well in case the cops had written down their numbers. He didn’t want to get arrested by using credit cards the police knew were fake. He had no idea why they didn’t take them out of the car, but it didn’t matter to him. John was going to jail, most likely, and the cards were useless to him. In the trash they went.

There were a lot of random papers thrown in the compartment. Most of them were junk: missing persons fliers, coupons to sketchy restaurants with the addresses circled, notes from families of victims; things collected on cases that were now unnecessary. They had to be from old cases because John would never throw anything of relevance in a pile in a glove box he barely ever went through.

Those also went in the trash.

Towards the bottom of the pile, however, Sam did find a weird map. There was a point of some place in Kansas marked on it, the address listed in the margins. It was nowhere near anything else, and he had never heard of the address before. It was a complete mystery.

“Maybe whatever this key goes to is here,” Sam said, pointing at the map. Gabriel and Castiel looked over his shoulder, inspecting the map as well.

“In the middle of nowhere in Kansas?” Castiel asked.

“Why would such an old key unlock something there?” Gabriel asked.

“I don’t know,” Sam said, “but it doesn’t hurt to try checking it out. I want to know what is there and why John is keeping a map of it.”

“It could just be something from one of his cases,” Castiel said.

“Maybe, but I think we should go there.”

The angels shrugged, not seeing any reason as to why they shouldn’t go to the address. They finished checking the car for anything else that was left in it, but there weren’t any other hints. The only thing that seemed odd to Sam was that the back seat seemed to have some sort of stain on it that looked suspiciously like blood. He figured John spilled blood that he was dipping knives into to kill monsters that required it and didn’t bother to clean it up. It looked fairly old, though, and John cared about this car, so he didn’t really get why it hadn’t been cleaned up yet.

He didn’t dwell on it for too long.

The three of them went to get their belongings from the motel rooms once they were finished searching the car. They packed up the Impala before all getting in, Sam in the driver’s seat. He studied the map for a bit before implementing the address into his portable GPS that he had transferred over from his old car so that he could get directions to wherever it was that they were going. He started out, following the directions he was given.

It took about a little bit less than a day, but eventually they arrived at the location. There was a lot of nothing around them, and they were all getting sick of watching endless amounts of empty land go by as they drove. Sam began to think that this map was leading him to a dead end. There was no way that a building with an actual address was all the way out here away from anybody.

But the GPS kept telling him where to go, and he kept following.

Eventually, they came across the building they were searching for. It was huge, but it looked abandoned. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been used in a very long time if the inside matched the outside. 

“It’s probably an empty building,” Sam said. 

“Could really be just a location of a body or something that John had to find during a case,” Gabriel suggested.

“There’s a door over there,” Castiel said, gesturing to an odd circular entrance with a door. They parked right in front of it before all getting out and approaching the door.

“It’s locked,” Gabriel said as he tried to open the door.

“Try the key,” Castiel said.

Sam took the key from where he had stored it in his pocket. He held it out to the door, trying to judge if it would fit in the lock before he actually tried it. He was very curious as to what this building was, and part of him was scared that the key would not fit. The other part was confident that it would, and he had to use that confidence to force himself to shove the key into the hole of the lock. 

It went in with no major resistance. 

He tried to turn the key to the left.

It didn’t budge.

He tried to turn the key to the right.

It turned.

The door opened.

Sam looked back at the angels with a grin on his face, unable to keep the excitement of finding out what they just found to himself. They grinned back, motioning for him to go in. Sam stepped into the building, the other two following along.

The inside made their grins widen even more. The place was insane! A hunter’s dream. Books everywhere, maps drawn out, rooms of beds, and a kitchen that could hold so much food. Looking through each room, they found more and more cool things that would make their life so much easier.

“Why did John have a key to this place without ever telling you or using it himself?” Castiel asked.

“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “He might have used it after I left, but from how nothing seems to have been touched in years, I would doubt it. I wonder who built this.”

“The Men of Letters,” Gabriel said.

“The what of what? Where did you get that name from?”

Gabriel pointed at a sign he was reading in one of the rooms they found that contained a lot of case maps and books. It had the same name, The Men of Letters. Some papers they found in the room gave them some more information, such as that they were similar to hunters and that the Winchesters’ were a legacy in the organization.

“Weird,” Sam said. “Why was John hiding this place?”

“I’m not sure,” Castiel said, “but we should keep looking around.”

They went further into the building, checking out every single room. There were quite a few bedrooms, and they already began making plans of keeping this “Bunker” as they had deemed it as their new base of operations. All of those books, maps, and articles contained so much potentially useful information, and the beds were free to use. The lights all worked when he switched them on, which surprised him at first. As far as Sam could tell, it all ran on its own electricity somehow. 

The last place they looked was in a basement area in the very back. The door to the last room was very large, made out of metal, and was the heaviest one in the Bunker. Pushing it open, Sam found that it was some sort of weaponry, as there were many, many weapons lining the walls and counters. Those were cool.

What wasn’t as thrilling or nice was what else they found in the room.

“What is that?” Castiel asked when he saw what made Sam stop dead in his tracks when entering the room.

“It looks like some sort of animal,” Gabriel said.

Sam crept forward, trying to see what exactly was in the cage lying in the middle of the floor. At first, he thought it was dead, but then it weakly peered up at him from where it layed, unable to lift its head.

“It’s a cat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And it starts really getting good ;))) hope you liked this chapter!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was iffy about posting this chapter because I am still kind of not sure if I like the ending of it, but I'm fairly certain I can live with it? Idk, I got on a roll of writing this today, but by the end I was second guessing myself. Here it is, though. Hope you enjoy.

Dean couldn’t remember what it felt like to not be in pain. Years had gone by with him being stuck in that cage. The entire time, he had to deal with the silver burning his skin, his father underfeeding him, and the cold from the room sinking into his skin. He could no longer move, which made eating the food John brought him harder. John gave no help. He sat there in silence as he struggled to eat, one time even chuckling at him when he fell face first into the meat he had been presented.

He also hadn’t been able to shift into any other form. He was stuck in the black cat form since he was too weak to transform. It made him feel sick that he was turned into a monster he hated, but even more so with how he couldn’t use his new powers, either.

Everything sucked, and Dean had long ago given up on the world possibly being kind to him again. He sat in his cage, falling deeper and deeper into depression as the weeks, months, and years passed by.

John came to feed him once every week or so. Dean knew it was once per week because John always reminded him about it. He’d mention that Dean was still surviving years later on eating deer hearts. He lost track of how many years had actually gone by, but he knew he had to be in his mid to late twenties by that point.

That made him feel even more depressed. So much time had passed with him trapped, unable to enjoy life like everybody else.

Dean just wanted to die sometimes.

The only thing that kept him going was the thought of his brother being alive somewhere. John had told him that Sam was no longer hunting with him. When Sam first left their father, John had been angry, and he took that anger out on Dean by starving him and laughing at him until he was too weak to open his eyes. The pain of eating again after that was horrible, but he did so anyway. He was still scared of death, no matter how much he thought whatever came after death had to be better than this.

Maybe the information he gave John about skinwalkers could help the world, though. It could possibly give hunters an inside look at how their appetites worked and how long they could go without food.

It would have been helpful if John actually shared that information, though. Dean doubted he ever did. He wouldn’t want anyone to know that he was holding a skinwalker captive. Besides, Dean never saw John write anything down, so he wasn’t taking notes or writing down examinations of him like he expected he would if he was serious about wanting to study him.

No, this was just plain torture for being a failure of a son. It was punishment for becoming a monster like one they had to fight.

Like any other day, Dean was currently laying in the cage, ignoring the constant pain and sulking over his life. He couldn’t move due to his limbs refusing to work anymore, and he wasn’t looking forward to the next time John would come. While he longed for more food, he knew John would be upset when he wouldn’t be able to get up to eat it. Whenever he got like this, John was crueler, and he would start yelling at him while he ate, calling him nasty names and belittling him. 

Dean anticipated his visit, knowing that the next one had to be coming up soon. He had gotten good at estimating how much time had passed since John’s last visit. A week was a long time to him, especially since he was always in pain, but he could pinpoint almost exactly when a week had passed.

And a week had definitely passed. John would be there at any moment.

Any second now.

He was only ever a day late to coming to feed Dean, not wanting to risk him dying on him. There was not one week where John would forget to come see him. There was a stack of rotting food in the corner of the room, waiting to be given to him. Dean had gotten used to the taste of no longer fresh food since John got sick of hunting deer every week. He began to just hunt a bunch one week and feed him the hearts of those for the next few weeks, not caring that it went bad quickly.

It kept him alive, and that was all that mattered to John.

That week passed, and John was not there. The next day came, and Dean knew he would come by the end of the day.

Yet, John still did not show up.

Something was wrong.

Dean waited and waited, his stomach growling in hunger as the pains increased, begging him for food. His body was always asking to be fed, but it had gotten used to the lack of nutrition over the years. It knew it would be fed once a week. However, as the time it was regularly fed went by, his body began to get angrier at him, demanding to know why it had not been given it’s weekly deer heart yet.

His brain wondered the same thing.

He wondered if something bad happened to John. In their line of business, something tragic could happen at any moment. The person they were trying to protect could get kidnapped or killed. A monster not bound to a specific place could end up getting away. The hunter itself could get bitten by a skinwalker in a fight, turned into what they hate, and get trapped in a silver cage for the rest of their life.

Maybe John got killed by something he was hunting.

Maybe John wasn’t coming back ever again to feed him. The thought made Dean happy, for anything terrible happening to John would be just what the man had coming for him. He hoped John would end up rotting like the meat in the corner was, unable to get to somewhere sunny and good. 

That would also mean that Dean would soon die, too. With nobody to feed him, he would eventually starve to death. 

At least he would finally figure out how long he could go without getting any food. It wouldn’t be accurate to a fully healthy skinwalker who didn’t get starved on a daily basis, but Dean would still see a good estimate to their lifespan.

Another day passed, and Dean knew John wasn’t coming anytime soon, if at all ever again. He listened to the silence of the building, there rarely ever being a creak despite it being an old structure.

The silence was almost peaceful. He couldn’t hear any wind from outside, any electricity coming from the wiring in the place, or any sort of animal creeping around. It was surprising that no wildlife had taken over, but apparently the walls of the building kept them all out. There weren’t any squeaky mice or loud, singing birds. The only noise he could hear was that of a door creaking open from the opposite side of the building.

Wait, what?

Dean could not lift his head, but he could strain his ears a little to try and pick out any more sounds. Was he going crazy, or was that really the sound of the front door opening? Was John finally there to feed him? Maybe he was late from a far away case, but even that did not feel right. John was always there on time.

The sounds of the power being turned on in the place took him by even more surprise. John never turned on the power, wanting to keep the place as quiet as possible as he observed Dean. He hadn’t even been aware that the electricity still worked. John sure as Hell was not paying for it, so he thought it would have been shut off, but there it was: the buzz of electricity flowing through the wires. The sound went straight to his overly sensitive ears.

It was very obvious that John was not who had entered the building when he heard multiple voices talking to each other. He couldn’t make out their words, but his better hearing did manage to pick out three different voices. Three people were there. Who were they and what were they doing there?

Part of Dean hoped that they would not find him. He did not want other people to see him like this. Who knew who they were and how they would react to finding him there. If they were hunters, they might know exactly what he was and would kill him on the spot. If they were regular people, they would be horrified to find a tortured cat in an abandoned place. He did not want to cause nightmares to a bunch of kids if he could help it. 

Of course, they had to find him. Only a few minutes after they first entered the building, the door to his room was being opened. He couldn’t look up at them, but he could hear them freeze at the sight of him.

“What is that?” One voice asked. Dean hoped they would run away now. He did not want them to get a better look at him.

“It looks like some sort of animal,” another voice said. 

One of the newcomers crept closer to the cage, their shoes making loud clicks on the ground as they neared. Dean tried to look up at whoever it was, but it hurt too much to move. He was also scared at what he would see. What if it was John bringing some more people to torture him? Worse, what if it was some random people who would kill him? The two voices he heard had obviously not been John, but the third could still well have been. 

Finally, he managed to lift his head a little bit and squint at whoever was standing in front of his cage. It wasn’t John. It was a young adult man who he didn’t think he had ever seen before. He seemed kind of familiar, but Dean had been away from anyone other than John for so long that he doubted he would even recognize his favorite celebrities anymore.

“It’s a cat,” the man in front of him said.

“A cat?”

“What is a cat doing in that cage?”

“And why is it so injured?”

The man studied him closely, trying to figure out what was going on. “I’m not sure.”

“John had the key to this place. Do you think he was who put it in there?”

“Maybe. Castiel, can you get the light switch over there? It’s kind of hard to see.”

One of the men, who Dean now knew was named Castiel, walked over to flip the switch on the wall by the door. Light filled the room, making Dean shut his eyes again. It was way too bright. It was so bright that it hurt his eyes.

“Shit,” the man in front of him said, “I think that hurt it.”

“Should I turn it back off?” Castiel asked.

“No, it will get used to the light eventually. I’m not sure how long it has been here, but from the state of it, I’d say a really long time. We need to try and figure out what is going on and how to help it, but we can’t do that in the dark in case something goes wrong.”

“Okay, what should we do?” 

“Gabriel, can you go find some towels and water to clean it up? Castiel, maybe see if there are any first aid kits anywhere? If not, I know there are some bandages in the car.”

Castiel and the man now known as Gabriel left the room to do as the third one requested. While they had been talking, Dean was trying to get used to the light. He was slowly opening his eyes before having to immediately slam them shut. A few attempts later, he was able to open them a little. He could barely see anything, but it was better than nothing.

“Hey, there, little fellow,” the man outside of the cage said to him, getting close to the cage. “I know you’re in pain, but my friends and I are going to get you out. We’re going to help you, okay?”

The man obviously wasn’t looking for an answer since he fully thought Dean was a cat, but Dean appreciated him talking to him anyway. It had been so long since he had seen anybody, and even longer since nice words had been uttered to him. It was nice to not be yelled at for once. 

Dean watched as the man opened the door to the cage, his eyes getting more and more used to the light each second. He was surprised how fast he was able to get used to it after being in the dark for so long, but he figured it was just another perk of being a skinwalker.

The man reached in to gently pick him up. Dean sighed in relief as he felt the lack of silver from around him for the first time in years. Even when Dean hadn’t been touching the silver bars, he could still feel their presence. Now, he was away from that cage. Not too far, but the man held him away from the torture that was the silver. 

“Let’s see what gender you are real quick.”

Ah, no! What the fuck? This random ass man was suddenly looking at his junk to see if he was a boy or a girl? Dean did not care whether or not he was a cat and this was a normal thing for people to do with animals. It was embarrassing as Hell!

“A boy, huh? Guess we can stop calling you ‘it’ now.”

The man left the room with him carefully being balanced in his arms. Normally, Dean would have been humiliated to be caught being carried like this, but since he was in pain and in the form of a cat, he did not particularly care at the moment. He was brought out into a larger, living room-like area where the other two were setting up a place on a couch.

“We found everything you asked for,” Gabriel said. “Castiel and I can try to heal him, but we should probably look at exactly what is going on with him before so we can figure out what happened.”

Heal him?

“Agreed,” Castiel said.

How were they going to heal him? It was going to take a long time, and Dean wasn’t sure if he could be brought back to full health anymore. 

“Let’s take a look at those wounds,” Gabriel said, gesturing for the man to give Dean over to him. The man holding him placed him on the blankets that were set up on the couch, letting Gabriel and Castiel get a better look at him.

“He’s definitely malnourished and dehydrated,” Castiel said. “His fur hasn’t been washed in a long time.”

Rude. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t keep up on his hygiene.

“Are those burns on his skin?” Gabriel asked. “What could they be fr-oh.”

Gabriel paused, realization crossing his face. He suddenly got up to run towards the room they found him in. 

“What is it, Gabriel?” The third man asked. When Gabriel came back, he had a horrified look on his face.

“That’s not a cat,” Gabriel said. Fear began to grip Dean’s heart. Gabriel realized what he was. They would kill him for sure, now.

“What do you mean?” Castiel asked.

“Sam, was your father doing any experiments on the things he hunted?” Gabriel asked.

Sam?

“No,” the third man said, “not that I knew of, anyway. Why? What does that have to do with this?”

That man was named Sam?

“There was a pile of deer meat in the corner of the room. It smelled real bad. It was definitely rotting,” Gabriel explained. “And the bars of the cage were pure silver. I think the floors and walls of the room had silver too.”

“Silver?” Castiel asked. “Why were they made of such specific material?”

“To trap a monster that couldn’t touch silver,” Sam said as he too realized what was going on. “That means this cat is…”

“Some kind of creature, yes. I’d guess a shapeshifter,” Gabriel nodded. Dean looked at them terrified, but he could not move away as they all stared at him in shock.

“So John was holding him captive,” Sam said.

They knew John. This man named Sam knew his father named John.

“Hey, we don’t know if it was John who locked him up here,” Gabriel said.

“Yes, we do!” Sam exclaimed. “Who else could it be? John had the key in his car! It’s obvious that nobody else has been here, so it had to be him! I knew he was a bad father, but to find out that he was this much of a monster too? It’s disgusting!”

John was this Sam’s father.

This was Dean’s brother.

That was Sammy standing right in front of him.

“I know this is upsetting,” Gabriel said, “but we need to figure out what we are going to do.”

“Yes,” Castiel said, “we don’t know why or what John was keeping locked up. This could be a really dangerous creature that was kept here for a reason. We don’t know what will happen if we help it.”

“Look at him,” Sam said. “He looks harmless.”

“For now. We can’t let our guard down.”

“I agree,” Gabriel said, “but I also feel like whatever John felt was necessary to lock up like this is not as dangerous as he’d like anyone to think. I would not put it past John to needlessly torture something. There are good exceptions to every creature.”

“Yes, like that vampire we fought a few weeks ago? One of its own kind turned against them and is now living happily off of animal blood,” Castiel reminded them.

“And you told us many times about the friendly werewolves and helpful ghosts you have met,” Gabriel told Sam. “We’ve even had demons help us before.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I think we should heal him. You said it’s a shapeshifter, but do you know for sure which kind? Many species can shapeshift.”

Castiel suddenly leaned over closer to Dean, studying him even more intently. “I think… I think he’s a skinwalker.”

Sam recoiled. Dean did not blame him. A skinwalker was what he believed to kill his brother. Even though Dean was sitting alive in front of him, he did not know that. Finding something of his kind would obviously make Sam uneasy.

“Are you sure?” Sam asked.

Castiel stared at him some more before nodding. “Yes, I am sure. The silver, meat, and the fact that he is a cat makes sense for a skinwalker. Not all shapeshifters can turn into animals, and skinwalkers are known for turning into things like dogs and cats. I think it makes the most sense.”

The three of them were silent for a moment, and Dean wished he could feel enough of his body to squirm. He was very uncomfortable and scared of what they would do to him, and them just letting him lay there in his agony was making everything worse.

Sam sighed. “Let’s heal him.”

“Are you sure?” Gabriel asked. “Sam, it’s okay to not want to help him. His kind did kill your brother.”

“No, like you said, there are good of every creature. You said the meat was deer, which means he hasn’t been eating humans. Sure, John was probably feeding him that, but the fact that he hasn’t eaten humans in however long he has been here has to mean something, right? He’d be dead most likely if he couldn’t survive without human hearts. Maybe this is a good skinwalker. I’d like to know for sure before we decide to kill him. We heal him until he can speak, find out what happens, and decide what we do as we go.”

Castiel and Gabriel seemed to like that plan. Dean definitely liked that plan. They were giving him a chance! His brother was deciding to try to trust him. He was grateful, and he knew he had to do everything in his power to prove to them that he was good. 

He would prove that he still had his humanity and deserved to become Sammy’s brother once again.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized as I was editing this that, for some reason, I have no problem planning out long fanfics that are or are almost novel length, but I can't find the motivation to write an actual novel like I have always dreamed of doing. One day, maybe lol.

Sam’s new friends were weird.

Dean watched them as they discussed what they were going to do. Gabriel and Castiel kept going on about how they were going to heal them, but from the way they were talking, it sounded like some kind of unconventional healing. Somehow, they knew how to do it instantaneously, which did not make any sense to him.

“He looks scared,” Castiel pointed out when he noticed how Dean was cowering before them.

“Of course he’s scared,” Sam said. “He’s been trapped in that cage, probably had to deal with John, and is now facing three unknown people that just showed up and moved him around. There’s a chance he can understand us too, though by how injured he is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was too out of it to focus on our words. Either way, he’s in an unfamiliar situation after being tortured.”

Dean could definitely understand them, and while he might not get some of what they talked about, he was not too out of it to not try to follow along. He was in massive amounts of pain, but at least it was beginning to lessen from being away from the silver and actually laying somewhere soft. 

“I’m quite surprised to see you defending him,” Castiel said, “but I am very proud of you for doing so. It must be hard to help something of the same species that caused you so much pain, but to look past that and give him a chance is mature of you.”

“Yeah, well, demons have caused us lots of pain too, and we’ve trusted some of them. Werewolves killed fellow hunters, yet we let them help us. I want to try to see the good in this one before it shows its evil first.”

Dean watched as Gabriel gave his brother a hug, and if he was able to move his body, he was sure he would have jumped in shock when he gave Sam a kiss on his lips.

“I’m proud of you, too,” Gabriel told him. 

When he was human, Dean remembered Sam coming home from school and talking about the cute girls in his class that he wanted to talk to but didn’t in fear of liking them and then having to leave. The fact that he was with a man now did not bother him one bit, but he could say that he never saw it coming. He was glad his brother found somebody, and for a moment he felt sad that he would never have that. Then, he remembered that he was literally sitting there in pain, and the thought was removed from his mind.

“Okay, so I’m going to assess his state and see how we can go about healing him,” Castiel said. He reached a hand out towards Dean, making him try to shy away from the hand. He gave a weak yelp when the movement made his entire body cry out in misery. He was surprised he was even able to make sounds like that with how he hadn’t tried making any for years. Castiel just shushed him as he placed a gentle hand on his body, his skin barely brushing against his fur. A weird glow washed over him as the man closed his eyes in concentration.

Dean had no idea what was going on. Why was he glowing? Castiel obviously wasn’t human, and that made him even more concerned. He did not know what this being was, what he was capable of, and what he might do to him. Dean almost expected it to start causing him more hurt.

No pain occurred. If anything, the feeling made Dean feel lighter, like the feelings overtaking his body took a short break from torturing him. A few seconds passed before Castiel opened his eyes again, the glow leaving and the familiar feeling of his skin itching and burning came back.

“How bad is it?” Sam asked. Dean thought that was a stupid question. Look at him! It was very fucking terrible, in his opinion.

“It’s horrific,” Castiel said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Can you tell how long it’s been going on?” Gabriel asked.

“It’s hard to tell, but if I had to guess, I’d say years.”

“Years?!” Sam echoed. “How is he still alive?”

“I think John was keeping him on the verge of death, but he definitely made sure he didn’t die on him,” Castiel said. “You can tell just by looking at him that his entire body seems burned. His ribs are sticking out, so we know he’s gone a long time without properly eating. I checked out his mental state, and while I think he will make a recovery and isn’t completely gone, I do believe it’s going to take him a while to trust us enough to shift into something else and talk to us. We’ll have to be careful not to scar him anymore if we want to figure out what John was doing and why.”

The other two nodded, agreeing that they could not force Dean to recover too quickly. Dean was glad that they would not try to get him to open up right away. He did not know how they, especially Sam, would react to him being who he was. Sam thought he was dead, for fuck’s sake. 

He was terrified that if Sam knew he was his brother, he would wish that he had been dead after all. What if he hated him for what he had become?

“So can you heal his wounds?” Sam asked.

“Gabriel will probably have to do that. His grace is more powerful, and even then he’ll likely not be able to heal him completely right away. His wounds are too extensive. He can get the worst of it, and then I’ll follow up to try and heal him some more, but then he’ll need to rest for a while, recover on his own, and we can continue trying to heal him little by little.”

Dean was officially lost. He had no idea what they were talking about. Grace? What the fuck was grace and how was it going to heal him? Whatever it was, he wished they would get on with it already. Didn’t they see how much pain he was in right now?

Luckily for him, Gabriel was now in front of him, speaking to him quietly.

“Hello there, little kitty skinwalker we found in a sketchy cage,” Gabriel greeted him. “I’m not sure if you can understand me right now, but I just wanted to introduce myself and my friends before we do anything to you so that you know we’re friendly. My name is Gabriel, and I am an archangel. Back there is my brother Castiel, also an angel of the Lord, and our friend Sam, who is a hunter. He hunts monsters, but you don’t have to worry about him hurting you. He’s nice to those who are not trying to hurt others, so we would appreciate you not trying to hurt us.”

Dean could not believe his ears. These two guys were angels? Angels existed? He wouldn’t have considered believing him if it weren’t for what he did next. Gabriel reached out as Castiel had, setting his hand against Dean, closing his eyes, and pushing some sort of what he could only think of as magic that made him glow. This time, it was more intense. It felt like Gabriel was sending some sort of energy through him. It was impossible, it had to be… but it wasn’t. Dean could feel his burns start to disappear, making his skin feel so much better. When Gabriel stepped away, Dean could not feel any of the pain from the burns anymore. He couldn’t remember the last time he had clear skin, but when he looked down at himself, he found that his toasted skin was healed and his fur was looking better than ever. It wasn’t perfect since it would have to mostly grow back, but it was a start.

Castiel stepped up again once Gabriel fell back, once again letting his grace consume him. Now that he was not in so much pain, Dean felt the warmth that came over him as Castiel tried healing him some more. It felt nice, kind of like how Dean faintly remembered the sun feeling like against his human skin, but better. He could feel his skin healing even more. His head felt a little clearer, and the pains in his stomach, muscles, and bones lessened as they grew stronger.

When Castiel was done, Dean felt so much better. Having two angels heal him as much as they did was amazing. He always thought about how long it would take him to get even a little bit better if he ever got out, but here these wonderful beings were, cutting that time by so much. 

“He looks a lot better,” Sam said when he saw how the healing went.

“He’ll still be in some pain,” Castiel said, “but not as much as he was. We need to get him some food, water, and rest now. We’ll also need to keep a close eye on his health in the next few days to make sure he is recovering well.”

“Okay, I’ll go out and find some fresh food, then. We can’t give him that rotting stuff from the room he was in. I’ll see if there is a butcher in a town nearby that has any fresh kills or something. Worse comes to worse, I hunt for some meat myself.”

With that, Sam left the room. Dean felt sad that his brother left, but he tried to not whine about it. Sammy was coming back, and he was going to be bringing him food that would actually nourish him. They weren’t going to let him starve like John did.

“Well,” Gabriel said to him, “how are you feeling, kiddo? Feeling better?”

Dean decided it was then that he should try moving to see what would happen. He didn’t want to feel anymore pain, but they had done such a good job healing him as they did, so he felt like he had to try to repay them by not sulking in an unmoving state. 

He braced himself, and he pushed, trying to turn himself on the couch. His eyes were clenched shut, expecting it to hurt.

There was no pain.

Dean’s eyes widened as he found that he could roll over without it causing him to black out. He glanced over at the angels for approval, trying to see if it was okay for him to be moving like this. He wasn’t used to being able to move on his own. He had gotten used to John’s yelling whenever he tried to cry out or move around, which quickly led to him staying still in his cage and allowing the pain without fighting against it. However, these angels gave him a nod, encouraging him to freely turn, roll, and squirm as much as he wanted.

After a little bit of slow, aimless movements while laying down, Dean decided to be a little bit more ambitious. He rolled onto his stomach, gathered his confidence, and tried to push up on his legs. He wanted to stand up, and he was determined to do so.

Until he fell right back down on his stomach.

Well, that was depressing.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Gabriel reassured him, immediately leaning down to lift him into his arms and hold him close to his chest. “You’re not going to be able to do anything too drastic for a while. You need to build up your strength first. We’ll help you, so don’t worry.”

Dean huffed to himself. He knew that, but it still made him feel weak. First, he had been trapped in a cage for years, and now he couldn’t stand on his own? On top of that, he was being held in a grown man’s arms.

He found that he didn’t mind as much as he thought he would, though. Not that he would admit that to anyone, especially not any of these guys. 

Sam came back a while later, carrying a bag of meat. He smiled when he saw the angels coddling Dean, not seeming to care at all that Dean was a skinwalker. Could Sam actually be accepting him so far? It was a miracle.

Dean was given some meat that Sam had gotten from a butcher. He told them about how he had to convince the guy working that shift to give him the whole thing, heart and all, and said that it was for a study he was doing on animal hearts. Dean tore into the food, not caring that they were watching him eat. He was so hungry, and he was finally being given good, fresh food. The others did not seem too bothered by his messy eating of a whole animal, making Dean feel even better about being able to eat as he wished. Later, he would likely try to eat less like a barbarian, but for now, he let himself have this.

Sam had gotten enough meat to feed him for the next few days. Unlike John, he actually stored the food in the kitchen where it belonged so that it wouldn’t rot. It would stay fresh for once. Dean was excited to get fresh food more than once a week.

For the rest of the day, the two angels, human, and skinwalker sat in the living room together, telling Dean stories about themselves and helping him move around a little bit. Mostly, he sat in one of their laps, them petting him and making sure he was doing okay. Dean learned a lot about angels and what happened to God and Heaven. He was shocked to hear that his “death” caused everything to go wrong. He didn’t understand it all since he wasn’t dead, but he went with it anyway. To him, there not being an apocalypse meant things went right instead.

He got to learn a lot about Sam’s life after Dean was gone. Sam told him about himself, of course. He learned all about how he viewed his “amazing, yet annoying, older brother.” He laughed internally at how he talked about the things he did, and he even wanted to cry when Sam talked about his death. Then, he went into how his relationship with John went downhill, how he left, how he became a great hunter, and how he met the angels. He told Dean about his relationship with Gabriel and how the two of them were very happy.

Sammy was happy. 

Dean was ecstatic to hear that his brother was doing well despite everything that had happened. Yes, Sam was very sad to no longer have his brother, but Dean focused more on how the rest of his life was turning out great after having met the angels. Eventually, he would be happy that Dean was alive, but that would have to be a while in the future. Dean did not think he would be able to reveal himself to Sam anytime soon. He was too scared.

When it got really late, Sam stood up to go to bed.

“I’m sure the little guy is tired,” Sam said, stretching his stiff limbs. “We should figure out how we are going to do the sleeping situations. Frankly, I’d like to sleep in one of those beds that I found because I am exhausted, but I can sit out to make sure nothing happens if needed.”

“No,” Castiel said, “you and Gabriel head to bed. I know you guys are probably wanting some alone time together after the craziness of today. You know angels don’t need to sleep, so I can watch over him in case he does try to surprise attack us for whatever reason.”

“You sure?” Gabriel asked. Castiel nodded, shooing them off to find a room for Sam to sleep in. Once they were gone, he turned to Dean, who was laying on the couch. He was very comfortable, and he hoped Castiel did not expect him to move from that spot.

“It’s getting old just calling you ‘him’ and ‘the skinwalker,’” Castiel said to him. Dean tilted his head, wondering where he was going with this. “I know you probably already have a name, but since you can not currently communicate it to us, would you mind if I gave you a temporary one to make it easier on all of us?”

Dean contemplated it for a moment before giving the angel a nod. It would be nice to be called something other than “skinwalker” since the thought of what he was still made him feel sick. 

“Okay, well, you’re a black cat, which is considered unlucky, so maybe we could poke fun at that and call you Lucky?” Castiel asked. Dean shook his head, hating it. Castiel began listing more names that he thought of, and eventually he threw out some random ones that had nothing to do with him being a cat. Dean refused to be called “kitty” or “whiskers,” so Castiel was forced to think outside the box. “All I can think of now is Sam’s car, for some reason. Car. Motor. Engine.”

These were stupid names, Dean thought. He wasn’t trying at all.

“Impala. Old. Chevy.”

Dean’s head snapped towards him at those last ones. Sam had the Impala? He drove the car that his father prized so much? Wow, something bad must have happened to him to give up the Impala to Sam.

Castiel must have thought that Dean approved of the last name he said by Dean’s strong reaction to the words. Truthfully, Dean hadn’t been paying attention to what came after “Impala,” so he hoped it wasn’t anything too bad. 

“Chevy it is, then,” Castiel said. Oh. Dean thought that was doable. That was a lot better than a basic cat name, and he was even being named after the Impala. Dean missed that car a lot, so he figured the name was okay for now.

After their talk (or Castiel’s talk and Dean’s rare gesture), Dean tried to get to sleep. For the first time since before he was turned, he got to sleep in comfort. He was surrounded by soft blankets on the most comfortable couch he had ever had the pleasure of laying on. 

However, as he tried to get to sleep, he found that he was having a hard time. It was such a different environment than he was used to. He was so used to sleeping in his own filthy cage that being clean (he had been given a bath earlier too), warm, and comfortable was somehow preventing him from sleeping. Something felt missing, and he could not fall asleep.

Castiel wasn’t sleeping either, but he was an angel. He didn’t have to sleep. Dean wished he didn’t need to sleep, but he knew that he wouldn’t feel good in the morning if he didn’t. If only he could close his eyes and drift off.

A thought crossed Dean’s mind. All of the pets he got earlier made him relax, no matter how embarrassing that was. Maybe… Maybe Castiel would let him sit with him so that he could pet him until he fell asleep?

No, that was too weird…

…unless?

He had to get his attention, but he couldn’t speak. Castiel was no longer paying too much attention to him, wanting to give him a chance to fall asleep without distracting him. He was aware enough that Dean would not be able to attack him (not that he would want to), but he was not looking directly at him.

Maybe he should… meow?? He was a cat after all. He hadn’t made noise all day, though. The last time he tried to use his vocal cords was about a year or two after he was first trapped in that cage. He had practically been mute for so many years.

He had to try.

Dean opened his tiny mouth, trying his best to meow at Castiel.

“M-eow.”

It was weak, hoarse, and overall disgusting, but it got Castiel’s attention. The angel turned to him immediately, a worried look on his face. When he saw that Dean wasn’t hurt or trying to hurt him, his shoulders relaxed and he tried to figure out what Dean wanted.

“Do you want me to try and help you fall asleep?” Castiel asked. Dean was relieved that he knew what he needed so quickly. He nodded at him, getting used to making those small movements again. Castiel smiled at him, coming over to sit next to him. Dean still could not stand up, but that did not stop him from trying. He pushed up to try and crawl closer to Castiel, but he fell back to the cushion with an oomph. 

Castiel knew what he was trying to do, and he reached over to gently pick him up and place him in his lap. Dean felt weird about sitting in this guy’s lap, especially because throughout the day he found that he really liked listening when Castiel spoke, but he let himself settle down and get comfortable again. He felt Castiel’s fingers begin to make their way through his fur, petting him lightly. They had all been worried that his skin was too sensitive, and his fur definitely wasn’t looking too great, so they were being overly cautious on petting him. This was enough, still, and Dean found that he was finally able to close his eyes and drift off into sleep.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My university gave us a two day break this week to make up for the fact that we don't get a spring break, and I spent the entire time reading and writing. I'll try to continue updating this quickly, but classes start back up tomorrow and I have a midterm on Friday that I have to study for. The next chapter will either be posted tomorrow as I procrastinate studying or Saturday when I am not stressed about calculus.   
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy the chapter! It's an interesting one, for sure.

If anybody told Dean years ago that he would become the equivalent to a house cat, he would have laughed in their face and would have told them that was less likely than them being able to fight off a large nest of vampires alone. Yet, here he was now, lounging on the lap of his brother while he pet his healthy fur and told him more stories about hunting - some he knew, some he did not.

A week or so had passed since they first found him. Each day, the angels would use their grace to heal him more and more. By then, he was almost completely better. His fur had grown back, clean, sleek, and shiny. His skin held no ache at all from any of the burns that had been there the week prior. He was beginning to gain back the weight that he lost from starvation, though that was going by slowly since the angels were not able to just give him fat and muscle to work with. They fed him every day, making sure he was not going hungry or thirsty. 

Dean was able to walk around a little too. He could go short distances with a limp, but he was proud that he was able to do so. Sam, Castiel, and Gabriel always made sure to remind him of how good he was recovering too.

At first, they were all skeptical of Dean. Sam wanted to trust him, but he couldn’t help but worry about whether or not Dean would really not attack them. It was fair enough. Dean could not complain about his brother being careful. It simply meant that he had to try harder to show that he was safe.

Although he was getting better, he was not able to shift into another form yet. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to shift right away once he got enough strength back. The thought of revealing his identity to his brother and friends made him feel queasy. He wanted nothing more than to go back to having Sammy by his side, a family to be part of again, and to maybe, possibly, go out and hunt again. He had to be careful, though. He couldn’t risk them taking one look at him and wanting nothing to do with him.

That idea was worse than Sammy not knowing who he was.

“Yo, Sammy,” Gabriel called from the living room. Sam and Dean were in the library, Sam researching for a case and Dean happily listening to him talk aloud about the book in front of him and getting pets. When he heard Gabriel’s voice, he looked up and tried to see what the angel needed. 

“Yes?” Sam asked.

“I got the TV working!”

One thing about the Bunker was that while it had a lot of cool technology and items to use for hunting, it did not have a modern TV. After years of not being in use, there was nobody to install a flatscreen. Gabriel thought they needed one in there to keep them entertained when not working, so he and Castiel went out to buy one. 

“That’s great!” Sam told him.

“Come check it out!” Gabriel called.

“I’m working on a case. I’ll watch something with you later.”

Only about a second went by before Gabriel was storming into the room, his arms crossed. “You’ve been working on that case for three hours now. It’s time to take a break.”

Sam shook his head. “But I want to get it done.”

“It’s not even an active case. Nobody is going to die from a ghost that doesn’t show itself until winter while you take a short break. We gotta introduce Chevy to television since he obviously hasn’t seen any in a long time.”

“Or maybe ever.”

“Exactly, so we have to show him Star Wars. Let’s go.”

Dean perked up when he heard that they were going to be watching Star Wars. He loved those movies as a kid! He remembered once watching all three in a row with Sam while their father was away. 

“Alright, fine,” Sam agreed. “He looks excited by the idea, so I guess it wouldn’t hurt.”

Dean cheered in his head. He was so ready to watch some of his favorite movies that he hadn’t gotten to see in so long. Hell, he would be ecstatic to watch My Little Pony if that was his only option. He just wanted to watch some TV again.

Sam followed Gabriel into the living room, carrying Dean with him. Dean was getting used to being carried everywhere. He couldn’t yet walk too far on his own, so no matter how much it hurt his pride, he had to suck it up and let them hold him.

He would never tell them that it felt nice to be held.

He would never admit that he craved those cuddles and hugs.

He was perfectly fine, thank you very much.

Castiel was already sitting on the couch when they entered the room, waiting for them. Gabriel went to grab the movies since he apparently bought the DVDs of them and a DVD player for the TV. while Sam sat down on the couch, placing Dean next to him so that he could choose where he wanted to sit. He knew that when Gabriel came to sit with them, he and Sam would be all cuddly and gross, and he did not want to be in the middle of that couple. So, he decided to go sit with Castiel.

Beautiful, kind Castiel. 

Fuck you, Dean did not have a crush on Castiel. He just appreciated the attractiveness that came with Castiel like any person would. He loved to sit and listen to him talk, thought he was cute when he didn’t understand the basic, human world, and preferred his cuddles over the others’. That was totally normal.

(Dean definitely had a crush on the guy.)

Sam did not look offended when Dean went to curl up on Castiel’s chest after the angel laid down with the couch reclined back. He probably knew that he didn’t want to be awkwardly in between him and Gabriel. Dean made himself cozy on top of Castiel, enjoying the warmth of his trench coat. Castiel immediately began to give him soft pets, and Dean did not shy away from quietly purring.

He was a cat. He was allowed to purr.

“Should we start with the original trilogy or the prequels?” Gabriel asked. 

The. What?!

Prequels???????

THEY MADE MORE???????

“I think we should watch them in release order. Give Chevy the experience we did with having to watch them the way they put them out,” Sam said.

“Do you agree, Cas?” Gabriel asked.

“I’ve never seen them, so I would not know,” Castiel said.

“You’ve never seen Star Wars?” Gabriel asked, shocked. “What kind of brother have I been to never introduce these to you sooner? Oh, we are definitely binge watching all of these tonight. It might take us until morning, but it will be worth it!”

Dean thought that sounded like a great plan. He wanted to watch the new ones really badly now. He had no idea that they were even planning on making more Star Wars movies, and he could not fathom what the prequels could be about. 

“I kind of want to see what it’s like in chronological order,” Gabriel said, “but if you think it’s better to watch in release order, we can do that.”

Dean meowed to show his agreement. The three of them stared at him when they heard him make noise since he rarely did so. It was usually him yelping in pain as he was recovering, but this time he meowed at his own will, not an ounce of pain in it.

“You agree that it should be release order, Chevy?” Castiel asked. 

Dean nodded his tiny head. He wanted to refresh himself on the original three before going into the new ones. He could not tell if the others understood that he had seen some of Star Wars before, but they did not question his request. 

“Alright then, release order it is,” Gabriel said as he inserted A New Hope into the DVD player. Once he pressed play, he came to sit with them on the couch, immediately going to smother Sam in cuddles.

They watched all six movies that night. Dean never took his eyes off the screen, wanting to capture every moment of each film. He felt so much nostalgia as he watched the first three, his mind constantly wandering to when he watched them in motel rooms with Sam. The prequels were wild, in his opinion. They weren’t as good as the first three, but he loved seeing some new movies that gave him a bigger look into the fictional universe he so loved.

He enjoyed every second of it.

By the time they finished watching all the movies, it was early the next morning. The angels were not tired, of course, since they did not have to sleep, but Sam and Dean were both exhausted. Skinwalkers needed less sleep than humans did, but with how much Dean still needed to heal, he had to sleep a lot more than he would like.

“It’s time for bed,” Sam said, pulling Gabriel up to head to their room. “I’ll continue working on that case later today. A nap is much needed right now.”

Soon, it was only Castiel and Dean left in the room. Dean was still curled up on Castiel’s chest, and he had no intentions of getting up. He did not care that he had been given his own room to sleep in so that he would not have to stay on the couch all the time. He would much rather sleep right there.

It wasn’t like he slept in his new bed, anyway. He somehow always managed to be back at Castiel’s side since he had such a hard time sleeping alone.

Castiel did not try to push Dean off of him. He did not ask him to let him up so that he could get productive things done. He let Dean stay with him, his fingers massaging his fur to help him fall asleep.

Yeah… Dean appreciated this man very much.

...

More weeks went by, turning into a month. Dean was pretty much at full health. His fur was cleaner than ever, his stomach full, and his limbs usable. He could walk around the Bunker all by himself with no help from the others.

It was amazing.

While his physical state was in phenomenal shape, he was still working on his mental being. He had nightmares at night about his days of torture. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw John throwing him in that cage again. He dreamed of Sam, Gabriel, and Castiel turning on him and leaving him to rot once more. Moldy food and silver burns plagued his mind. 

Castiel did not question him when he refused to try to go to bed alone anymore. Dean neglected to use his own room, preferring to sleep next to Cas instead. He helped the nightmares stay away better, and when they did haunt him, he would calm him down. 

The three of them trusted Dean now, it seemed. There were no more suspicious looks, hesitation when feeding him, or pleas to not turn on them. They didn’t think twice about letting his touch starved self bathe in their pets and gentle hugs.

Everything was going great.

Until it wasn’t.

It started with a phone call.

The four of them were sitting in the living room once again, watching more movies. A huge case had just been finished, so they felt that they deserved to relax and not think about hunting for a short time. They were all quiet as they watched, Dean enthralled by the entire film.

He whined when they had to pause it because of Sam’s phone ringing.

“Hello?” Sam asked as he answered the phone. A normal human would not be able to hear what the conversation was from the other side of the line, but with his heightened senses, Dean heard the other person perfectly fine.

And it made his blood turn cold.

“Hey Sam,” John’s voice said. Sam gave them all a horrified look, and it turned worse when he noticed that Dean could hear everything. He decided to put the phone on speaker so that the angels could hear too, thinking that it would be easier to talk about later if they could hear the conversation themselves instead of having him explain it to them. He knew that whatever John wanted was not likely to be good.

“John?” Sam asked. “Aren’t you in jail by now?”

“Yes, but they let me make my one phone call. I had to think for a while about which number you are currently using before I called so that I’d have a good chance of you answering.”

“Okay, so what do you want?”

“I was told that you took the Impala.”

“Yeah, so? It’s not like you’re going to need it anymore.”

“That’s fine, but I was wondering what else you found in it. Did the police leave my journal there? Or any of the guns?”

“Or the key in your glove box?” Sam asked, guessing that John was worried that he found out his little secret.

“...Yes, that,” John said, his voice strained. “I’m sure you’re curious as to what that goes to. See, I used to have this deposit box in-”

“You don’t think I’m that stupid, do you? A deposit box? Really? There were literally directions leading straight to the building the key belonged to. How would I not figure out what it was for?”

“Wait, you mean you went there?”

“Of course I went there.”

John grew angry. “Sammy…”

“For the last time, you do not get to call me that, especially after what I have found here! How could you torture a creature like this, John? How could you be so cruel as to leave a living being here to starve?!” This fight was a lot stronger than any that Dean had witnessed between the two of them before, and this was over the phone. He wondered if this was how it was after he was gone: them constantly screaming at each other. No wonder Sam left as soon as he could.

“It’s a fucking skinwalker, Sam!”

“He hasn’t once tried to hurt us! He doesn’t eat humans, and he acts very civil with us! Just because he’s a skinwalker does not mean he’s automatically evil,” Sam said.

“You don’t understand,” John said. “You don’t know who that skinwalker is.”

“Well, care to explain then?”

Dean whimpered. Castiel pet him to try and comfort him, sensing that he was stressing over hearing the voice of his old captor. He didn’t know that he was scared of what John was saying, but he sure knew that Dean recognized John’s voice. 

Was John going to reveal his identity after keeping him a secret from Sam for years? Would he ruin their dynamic by telling them that he was Dean?

No. What he said was worse.

“That’s the skinwalker that killed your brother.”

Sam was silent after that. Castiel’s hand froze from petting him, all of their breaths catching in their throats.

“He… what?” Sam asked. “He killed Dean?”

“Yes,” John said. “It was the one that knocked you out before killing Dean when he went to save you. I managed to capture it and trap it in that place after I dropped you off at the motel. I’ve been studying it and trying to learn more about skinwalkers. The only reason I haven’t given my research to any other hunters is because it is absolutely useless and wouldn’t give me any good information.”

“Oh…” Sam did not know what to say after that. Dean could tell that he felt betrayed. He looked absolutely broken at this new information.

The new, false information.

But Dean could not tell him otherwise. He refused to shift to show that it was him. While John did lie about him being the one that attacked Sam, he was technically not wrong about the rest.

Dean was the one that killed Sam’s brother. He was the reason he was not the human he once was. Sammy’s brother was gone. All that was left was a monster, and he could not change that.

Sam wouldn’t want a monster as a brother.

Sam hung up the call before turning to stare at Dean. The angels had been frozen, but as soon as they saw Sam off the phone, they jumped away from Dean. He fell to the couch as he felt Castiel push him away, the two angels going to stand by Sam as they all looked at him in shock. Dean could only roll over and stare up at them with a whine, hoping they would not believe John.

“You killed my brother,” Sam whispered. “You killed Dean and we’ve been sitting here feeding you and treating you like a good person! You’ve been a killer this entire time and we trusted that you were not like the others!” 

Sam started forward, ready to fight him. Dean only cowered back, trying to disappear into the couch. He did not want to fight his brother. If Sammy came after him, he knew he would not be able to fight back. He would let Sam kill him, no matter how much he wanted to live and fix things between them. He also did not want to risk accidentally biting Sam if he defended himself. He would never forgive himself if that happened.

Luckily, Gabriel stopped him. He held him back by grabbing his arms, refusing to let go even when Sam began to struggle against him. “Sam, wait. I know you’re upset, but he’s been good so far. Maybe we shouldn’t kill him yet.”

“He’s a monster! He deserves to pay for what he did! Dean was only a child!” Sam yelled, enraged.

“I know, but just calm down first! We can think through our options tomorrow, but I think it would be unwise to make a rash decision right now when you might regret it later.”

“Yeah, like I would regret killing the monster that took my brother from this world way too soon.”

“Come on, let’s go to bed and come back to this problem tomorrow morning when your head is clear.”

Sam shook his head. “I’m not going to go sleep when I know that thing is here.”

Dean whined at being called a thing when before they saw him as an equal. It felt like a slap to the face, but much, much worse. It felt like he had just been bit again and had his life ruined all over. 

“The doors to each of these rooms are designed to not let monsters in or out, remember?” Castiel asked. “It will be safe to keep him in one room without having to worry about him getting out. Gabriel and I will keep a lookout just in case.”

Sam groaned, but he agreed. He let Gabriel take him away, tasking Castiel with securing Dean in a place he could not escape. Dean yowled when Castiel came over to pick him up, not wanting to go wherever he would deem it necessary to put him. He was terrified that he would decide to throw him back in the cage. What if this led to them treating him like John did? He didn’t want to go back to a lifetime of pain.

“I’m disappointed,” Castiel said as he came upon Dean’s room. He placed him on the bed, making sure he stayed before beginning to leave again. “I was really starting to like you.”

Dean watched as Castiel closed and locked the door, the last part of him visible being his betrayed face. It made Dean’s heart ache, and he wished the angel would have tried to give him a chance to explain himself.

But they all took John’s word for it.

Stupid, evil John that none of them liked for being such a bad father.

They all believed him over the truth that they witnessed first hand over the past month of getting to know him. Sure, he couldn’t speak and didn’t tell them who he was, but he thought they were finally past their mistrust. He thought they saw him as part of their family like he considered them his.

The nightmares were worse that night. Even after crying himself to sleep with desperate mews, he woke up in a panic and could not calm down.

He no longer had an angel to calm him down.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My brain is absolutely fried. The amount of calculus I've done in the last few days has been horrendous. I apologize if this chapter is the worst one yet, doesn't make sense, or is a bad follow up from the last chapter. It's four in the morning for me and all I've wanted to do since the end of my calc midterm was to write, so I had to write it and get it posted ASAP to make myself feel better and proud of myself for something. :) Anyway, I'll stop with the excuses. I do hope it is not as bad as I think it is. I promise the next chapter will be a lot better.

The next day was awkward. It was uncomfortable as Hell. Nobody came to let Dean out of the room. Not one person came to see how he was doing, if he needed cuddles, or if he was hungry. He didn’t expect them to after what had happened, but it still hurt.

He stayed quiet for the entirety of the morning, scared of making his new family (or the family he thought he had before John called) angrier at him. It wasn’t their fault that they reacted the way they had. It was only natural that they would be mad at him for something that was his own fault.

If he hadn’t gotten bit all of those years before, this wouldn’t be happening. He wouldn’t be hurting his family all over again by reopening old wounds. He and Sammy could have been out there hunting together, making the best team there was, but no… he ruined it all before it could begin.

He should have done better.

When afternoon started to creep in (as shown by the clock Sam had put in his room a few weeks before), he began to grow a little more worried. He could hear them walking around in the Bunker a little bit, but they mostly stayed in what he assumed was probably the living room or library area. Dean assumed they were talking about what to do with him. He hoped they would have at least some mercy on him. 

Even if he didn’t deserve it.

By that point, he was starting to get hungry. His appetite wasn’t considered normal yet since he went so long being starved, but it was getting to where he would feel hungry after not getting food in a timely manner. It had been over a day since he last ate, and his stomach was beginning to growl.

Dean knew that he couldn’t go begging for food. First of all, they would likely not hear him even if he did whine at the door. They were too far away from his room, probably too scared to come anywhere close to him. Second of all, there was always that chance that they were going to refuse him even if they did hear him. Maybe they really would start treating him like John did. It was only a matter of time before they either stuff him back in that cage or straight up kill him.

He didn’t know which one was worse. On one hand, Dean didn’t want to die if there was a slim chance that he could one day convince Sam to trust him and show him who he was. On the other, he really, really,  _ really _ did not want to suffer in that cage again.

Another hour passed before Dean heard movement coming from out in the hallway. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought that whoever was out there was coming right for his door. That was crazy, though. 

To his surprise, however, the door began to open. Dean looked up in shock from where he was laying on the bed, head between paws and ears flat against his head in cowardice. He didn’t know who was coming in through the door, but he hoped it was not Sam coming to finish him right then and there. He would much rather it be Gabriel, who seemed like the only one that might have been on his side the night before with how he prevented Sam from lashing out on him right away. 

The door swung open, and there stood… Castiel. The sweet angel he had so fallen in love with during the past month who he hoped he would never disappoint. Remembering how crestfallen Castiel had looked yesterday at hearing that Dean was the cause of so much pain in Sam’s life made Dean feel heartbroken. He did not want to be the cause of Castiel’s sadness.

When Castiel stepped into the room, his face held significantly less misery. Dean hoped that was a good sign, but he doubted that it meant anything. Maybe he was just trying to keep a poker face so as to not cause Dean to go into a rage and attack him.

Castiel was holding a plate of meat. Dean was thankful that they were still feeding him despite the bad news they heard from John. He was surprised that Castiel was willingly coming into his room, but he would not complain. Even getting to see his face for a few seconds without him attacking him made him feel a little bit better about the future. 

“Chevy,” Castiel started before hesitating. He seemed to be thinking about what he wanted to say, which Dean thought was stupid because he deserved whatever horrible thing that would come out of his mouth. He hoped he would get whatever rant he had for him out of the way so that he could go back to wallowing in his sorrow alone once more.

Dean tried to hide himself as much as he could on the bed when he saw Castiel walk in. He was partly under the covers, but he couldn’t get fully under without moving around a lot, and he did not want to draw Castiel’s attention to him too much. He was scared of what he would say if he didn’t behave well right now, and making any sudden moves could cause the angel to react badly.

“It’s okay,” Castiel said, closing the door behind him and approaching the bed. “I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry for not defending you yesterday and reacting badly, but I don’t believe you would hurt us. I’m not sure exactly who you are or why John is so against you, but I would like to believe that he’s lying to us.”

Could it be? Was Castiel actually coming to him to tell him that he wanted to trust him? If that were true, that would make Dean almost the happiest cat in the world. The only thing that would make this better would be his brother trusting him too. 

Castiel came closer to the bed, and Dean couldn’t help but press himself further into the bed, still wary of him. The angel’s words might have given him hope, but he was used to being falsely led. He could turn on him at any moment if he wasn’t careful.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Castiel said when he saw Dean try to hide, “I promise.”

Well… you only live once. Dean knew this could potentially bite him in the ass, but he had to at least attempt to be happy when his life so far had caused him nothing but anguish. He was going to go against his better judgement and try to believe what Castiel was saying. He slowly crept out from his half hiding place to perch at the edge of the bed, looking up at Castiel as he stood in front of him.

“I knew you must be hungry, so I brought you some food,” Castiel told him. “I’m sure it would be messy if you tried to eat on the bed, so maybe it will be better to eat down here.”

Dean watched in surprise as Castiel sat on the ground, placing the plate of meat next to him. He was not expecting him to want to join him on the floor while he ate. Even though Castiel said he didn’t think Dean would hurt him, he was still astonished to see that he was willing to be so close to him so soon.

He appreciated that. He loved that.

He loved him.

Holy shit, Dean Winchester really was in love with this angel, wasn’t he? That should have scared him, especially since he did not know how Castiel would react to a long thought dead man turned skinwalker being in love with him. 

Oh, well. It wasn’t like he would ever find out. Dean didn’t have to fear something that would never pan out.

Dean stood up and jumped to the ground semi-gracefully. He sat right by the plate of meat and began to chow down, savoring every bite and was pleased to find the hunger fading away. Halfway through eating, Dean jumped with a start when he felt a hand on his fur. Castiel was petting him, as smooth and tender as he always did. He went back to eating, purring now as Castiel kept petting him and reassuring him that he was going to be okay. 

“So Gabriel and I talked with Sam a lot last night and this morning,” Castiel said when Dean was finished eating. “We managed to get him to calm down and think through this more logically. He realizes that he shouldn’t have believed John’s words right away since he does have a track record of lying to him. You’ve also given us no reason to think that you are bad or would hurt anyone. It’s going to take a while for him to feel safe being around you again since none of us know your story or whether or not you are the one who killed Dean, so don’t be offended if he is… off for a while. We’ve convinced him that you won’t hurt any of us and that Gabriel and I will keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t try anything. You won’t be locked up in here anymore.”

If Dean were in Sam’s shoes, he would not have agreed to let him out at all. He would have forced Castiel to stay away from him. He guessed that he should be grateful that Sam was going to let him out and try to work out the truth, but he couldn’t help but feel that it was reckless. What if he wasn’t Dean? What if he was a random skinwalker? What if he really was the skinwalker that turned him? Sam did not know that he was his brother, so to him that last option was a very real possibility. Dean would have smacked him for making that decision.

“I do have to ask,” Castiel said, “but do you think you would be willing to shift to your human form at any time soon and communicate with us? It would be great to hear your side of the story, and I know if Sam could talk to you and see you for who you actually are, he would be able to make better conclusions as to how he feels about you. I know you guys only really have one human form that you can shift into, so it would be very helpful.”

Dean’s heart froze hearing those words. He thought he would have more time to heal and prepare himself before revealing who he was. He did not know how he was going to explain what happened to his brother, and he was truly terrified of the backlash that would come when Sam saw that he was a monster and went a whole month without telling him. 

“It doesn’t have to be right now,” Castiel added, “but soon.”

He knew Castiel was right. He had to own up to himself and all that had happened eventually, and the more he put it off, the worse the outcome would be. So, he nodded at Castiel, agreeing to shifting soon. He was not ready to do it that day, but he would do it soon.

He swore he would.

“Good,” Castiel said, a smile on his face. “Thank you. I am excited to finally be able to talk to you face to face.”

The two of them did not leave the room that day even though Dean was allowed to again. They spent the time in Dean’s bed instead, Dean sitting in Castiel’s lap as the man petted him and told him more stories about angels and Heaven. He explained how the timeline was originally supposed to go, with Sam and Dean playing the roles of Lucifer and Michael. He talked about how God left and abandoned their world when those plans were lost. Somehow, God neglected to tell the angels that Dean was not really dead. Dean knew it was because he did not want a skinwalker to be part of the timeline he created. Dean was supposed to stay human and be this huge pawn in God’s game.

He might have ruined everything by getting turned, but at least he managed to prevent all of the carnage of an apocalypse years before it happened. One good thing came out of this situation, it seemed.

That night, Dean fell asleep next to Castiel again instead of alone and crying like the night before. It was nice, and he hoped it would stay that way forever now.

He hoped things would start to go back to normal.

...

Dean liked not waking up alone. He was able to breathe better as he awoke since there were no nightmares chasing him. Castiel was there to shoo them away. It was great.

Castiel took him out of the room that day. Dean had been planning on staying in the room all day again, afraid of facing the others. Castiel only sighed when he saw Dean try to sneak under the bed to escape leaving the safety of his room, simply scooping him up and giving him no choice as he brought him to the living room. Sam and Gabriel were already in there, somehow knowing that they would be out soon.

“I thought you wanted to wait to see him,” Castiel said when he saw them. 

“Sam is insisting again,” Gabriel said. Dean didn’t know what he meant, but he figured it couldn’t be anything good. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like it.

“Sam,” Castiel started, but Sam interrupted him.

“I need answers if he is going to stay here,” Sam said. 

Answers…that really did not sound good to Dean. That could only mean one thing…

“He has to shift and explain himself right now,” Sam finished. 

Well shit.

Castiel tried to convince him to give Dean more time again. “Don’t you think we should wait until-” 

“No, it has to be right now,” Sam insisted. It was silent after that, nobody wanting to argue with him more lest he got angry. 

So this was happening. Dean was not ready, and he felt like he was going to have a panic attack at even the thought of shifting to a human in front of them right now. The last time he was in his human form was when he was first shoved in that larger cage, and he knew he would not look pretty anymore. After the Hell he went through, there was no way he would be recognizable anymore. 

That made him feel worse. That thought hadn’t occurred to him before. What if Sam didn’t even believe him to be Dean? That would be the icing to this horrible, disgusting cake.

Dean slumped against Castiel for a second before struggling in his arms in an attempt to get down. Castiel got the message and placed him on the ground. The three of them watched him in anticipation as he stepped forward, getting ready to try and transform. He didn’t know if it would even work, but nobody would be able to say that he didn’t try.

He closed his eyes and got ready.

He was so not ready for this.

Okay, on a count of three. He would give himself a few seconds to breathe, but by three he would have to shift. That was the deal he made with himself, and he would keep his word. 

Okay… one. 

He took a deep breath in.

Two.

He exhaled slowly, trying to delay this as long as possible.

And thr-

_ Ring _ .

Dean’s eyes shot open, startled by the sound. Looking around him frantically, he saw that it was Sam’s phone ringing that caused the interference. 

Damnit, Sam. Everytime anything good was happening, his phone had to ring and ruin the moment. Well, this time Dean guessed he had that to be thankful for. It meant he could wait to reveal himself some more.

“Hello?” Sam greeted as he answered the phone.

Last time, the voice on the other side of the phone instilled so much fear in Dean. This time, the person he heard made him long to see them again. He was filled with so much happiness just by hearing their voice from a phone with his super hearing. 

“Hello, Sam,” Bobby said.

“Oh, Bobby. How are you?”

“To be perfectly honest? Not great. I’ve got a case that I’d like you to help me with.”

“Yeah, of course. What’d you find?”

That was when Bobby got into how a pack of vampires were making camp in the town near his house. There were far too many for him to take on by himself, so he wanted Sam and his angel buds to come help him out. Sam agreed right away, getting as many details as he could out of the man before hanging up.

“We gotta go,” Sam said as he stood up to start getting the Impala ready. “Bobby needs our help with some vampires.”

“What are we going to do with Chevy?” Gabriel asked. “We can’t leave him here by himself. He could starve if we’re gone for a while.”

Sam looked really conflicted. Dean knew that he wanted to leave him here so that he did not have to deal with him during their trip, but his brother was smarter than that. He knew better than to leave an unknown skinwalker alone in the Bunker with no supervision. 

“Fine, we’re taking him with us, but as soon as we’re done with this case, he’s shifting and we’re having a real conversation,” Sam said.

“Wow, surprised you don’t want to make him do it in the car,” Gabriel joked.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Whatever, we’ve got to focus on getting to Bobby’s and working on this case. I don’t want to worry about questioning Chevy at the same time. Come on.”

Dean watched as the three of them gathered all of what they needed to take with them. He had no belongings to worry about, so he only had to wait for them to be ready before he was carried outside by Castiel.

Outside. It had been years since he got to be out in the sun.

Too bad it was raining right now. He would have gladly revelled in the rain if they had time, but he was placed in the backseat of the Impala before he could even register the water against his fur. 

But then again, this was so much better. Dean was in the Impala again, and John wasn’t even there to hurt him. It was all the good without the bad, and he would be able to sit in his favorite car for hours before they got to Bobby’s. All of that while also getting to sit next to Castiel. He could even ignore the bloodstain ruining the backseats, knowing perfectly well that it was likely from a deer John had hunted for him.

It would be a great car ride.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :) Enjoy~

It was already a miracle getting to see his brother again after so many years of torture and thinking he would be alone forever. Seeing Bobby, the man that was more of a father figure to him than his own father was, made him feel even more elated. 

“You have a cat,” Bobby stated when he opened his front door for them. Dean was in Castiel’s arms once again. He wanted to walk to the door on his own, but Sam did not trust Dean to not go running off, so he insisted on Castiel carrying him. It must have been a strange sight for Bobby to be greeted with: an all powerful angel with a small, seemingly harmless kitty.

“Skinwalker, actually,” Gabriel said.

Yeah, not so harmless, huh.

“What in the devil’s name do you have a skinwalker for?” Bobby asked. Apparently, Sam did not give him any warning about what Dean was. He half expected him to have been keeping Bobby up to date during the month after finding Dean, but it was not so. 

“You know that Bunker I told you about? The one John had the key for that I found in the Impala?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, we sort of found him locked up in a cage there.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me about it, Sam? Why would you let a skinwalker roam free? Did you even try to figure out why it was locked up in the first place?”

“He hasn’t tried hurting us,” Gabriel defended Dean, knowing that Sam likely wouldn’t. “We’re working on getting answers, but we wanted to bring him with us so we can keep an eye on him while away from the Bunker.”

“And I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure how you would react,” Sam said. “I thought it would be best to see what happened first before getting you too involved.”

Bobby sighed, but he decided to trust that they had the situation under control. “Well, get in here with him before I change my mind. If he so much as looks at me as food, I swear I will make all four of you sleep in the car.”

They followed Bobby into his house. Once the door was shut behind them, Dean was allowed on his own four feet. Bobby kept a distance from him, obviously nervous about having him there, but Dean felt that it was a good sign that he was willing to try like the others were.

Dean couldn’t help himself as they walked further into the house. He took his time to look around, trying to remember the layout of the place from when he used to visit with John as a child. Most of the furniture was the same. The couches, lights, and decorations all felt so familiar to him. It had been years since he last stepped foot in this house, and yet it felt like he never left. It was like his body was coming home for the first time in forever, reuniting with his soul that was still there for all that time. 

“So tell us about these vampires,” Sam said as they took seats in Bobby’s kitchen. He had his notes spread out on the kitchen table, all arranged in an organized mess. Sam and the angels began reading over what he had found and researched, listening as Bobby explained what happened.

“They only moved in recently, but they began finding people to feed on almost immediately,” Bobby said. “I managed to track their nest to one of the old warehouses at the edge of town, and I know those were empty not so long ago, so that’s how I know they haven’t been here for too long. There’s already been a couple of missing persons reports, and I have a bad feeling that the vampires are the reason for it.”

“So we need to come up with a plan to kill them,” Sam said. 

“I think it would be fairly easy to storm them,” Bobby said. “They’re not exactly in a well hidden spot. Those warehouses have been emptied out, so they’ll be out in the open if we can get in.”

“Okay, so when do you want to do it?”

“As soon as possible. I’d say tonight if we can.”

That was that. They got there, and they were already planning to go take down the vampire nest. Dean felt proud of his family for being on top of the game, willing to go out and hunt down the monsters who were hurting other people as quickly as they could so that more people didn’t go missing. Hunting was serious business, and he was a prime example of what could go wrong, but it was always worth it to help as many as they could.

He missed it.

“What are we going to do about Chevy?” Gabriel asked.

“We can’t take him with us,” Sam said. 

“He could be a good asset to have,” Castiel said. “Skinwalkers are strong, so maybe he would be willing to help us fight the vampires.”

“Or he could turn on us at the first chance he gets.”

“I think he would have turned on you ages ago if he was planning on doing so,” Bobby said. Dean was shocked to hear him stand up for him. He thought he would be wary of him as Sam was, but it seemed like he was already trying to see the good in him.

“Even so, he is still healing from his trauma,” Sam said. “Skinwalkers might be strong, but we don’t know how much of his strength he currently has. He might end up getting in the way or killed right away during the fight.”

“Awe, admit it, Sammy,” Gabriel said, “you’re worried for the little guy.”

“What? No, I’m still mad at him for what John said. He still needs to prove to us that he is trustworthy by shifting and talking to us.”

“Wait,” Bobby said, “what did John say? I thought he was already in jail when you found the Bunker.”

“He was,” Castiel said, “but he called Sam the other day.”

“He said Chevy was the reason Dean was dead,” Sam explained.

It was silent after that. Bobby had a confused look on his face as he processed the words. 

“So he was saying that skinwalker is the one who killed Dean?” Bobby asked.

“Essentially, yes,” Sam clarified. 

“Odd.”

Sam, Castiel, and Gabriel looked at each other, unsure of what was going through Bobby’s head. 

“What’s odd?” Gabriel asked.

“John told me that all of the skinwalkers you guys were hunting that day were dead. He said he got to the one that killed Dean before he could kill Sam too.”

“Maybe he lied to you,” Sam suggested. “He never told me about the Bunker. Maybe he really wanted to keep his experimentation a secret.”

“Or maybe the one he lied to was you,” Bobby said.

Nobody had anything else to say to that, but throughout the rest of the day, Dean kept catching Bobby staring at him in bewilderment. He was obviously trying to figure out what was going on and was hoping that Dean would give him some kind of answer. Too bad for him, he would not be getting any from him at the moment. He was putting off shifting for as long as he could. He knew he would have to after the vampires were dead, but he would relish the time he got to procrastinate it. 

That night, right before the four hunters set out to ambush the vampire nest, Bobby found Dean looking at some of the photos he had sitting on one of his desks. There were only a few, but Dean remembered each one from before. He had seen them all before, and he could only sit and stare at them in sadness as he longed for the days those photos represented.

“Those are photos of my family,” Bobby told him as he came to stand by the desk. Dean was laying on top of it, getting comfortable and planning to stay there and look at them until they all got back from the hunt. 

Dean glanced up at Bobby, expecting to see him angry for getting near his stuff, but all he found was kindness instead. Bobby always was a better person than anybody else he ever knew, so he shouldn’t have been so stunned by him not being afraid of Dean. He looked nowhere near as suspicious of him as he had earlier.

“That one is of my wife, Karen,” Bobby told him, pointing at a black and white photo of a woman. Dean knew all about Bobby’s wife. He told him many stories about her and how much he missed her. “She’s dead now, I’m afraid.”

Dean stared at the photo of Karen, wondering how Bobby’s life would have ended up if she never died. He wouldn’t have gotten so into hunting if she was alive. He wouldn’t have had to deal with losing Dean too if he didn’t fall into the hole of hunting and didn’t meet John.

“Those other photos are of some friends and family I’ve made while hunting. I’d trust any of them with my life,” Bobby said. Looking at the photos, Dean recognized a lot of faces of the older hunters that he, Sam, and John used to run into a lot. He remembered them being close to John and Bobby, and he would likely be closer to some of them now and surely would have worked cases with them when they needed help if he were human. 

One thing Dean took great notice in was that not a single one of the photos contained John in it. He thought Bobby would consider him family too, but it seemed that he no longer held John in the high regard that he once had.

“That one right there is our own Sammy,” Bobby said while tapping on one of the last photos. “And next to him is the boy they keep talking about: Dean. I don’t know if they told you much about Dean, but he was Sam’s older brother.”

The photo showed Sam and Dean sitting in the Impala as young boys. Young Dean had his hands on the steering wheel, pretending to drive, while Sam was laughing in the passenger seat. Dean remembered the day that photo was taken clearly. It was a few days after they arrived at Bobby’s house for a visit one time, and the boys were getting bored from sitting around for so long. They went outside to get some fresh air and Bobby had asked them to get in the car and pose for a photo.

Dean wished he could go back to that day. He was a lot happier back then.

That was all of the photos, and Dean could not make himself look away from them. He missed all of the people in each one, and he desperately wanted to be able to go back to when things were normal.

He didn’t want to be a monster anymore.

When Dean was finally able to look away from the memories in the photos, he found himself staring at Bobby instead. The man had gone silent next to him, and when he looked closely, he found that there were tears in his eyes. He wanted to go over and comfort the man, but he didn’t want to startle him or make him uncomfortable with having a skinwalker be even closer than he was to him. 

Bobby eventually saw him staring at him, and he gave him a small, sad smile. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking about Dean. Sam mentioned that John said that you’re the reason he’s dead, but I can’t see how that can be possible. I remember John going into explicit details to me about what happened that night. He told me that he was sure he killed all the skinwalkers. He looked genuinely scared when he talked about how Sam almost died too, so I truly believe that he was not lying when he said he killed the one that attacked him and Dean. I just can’t figure out why he would be lying now, though. I don’t see what he is hiding about you.”

Dean almost shifted right then and there. For the first time, he wanted to go ahead and transform so that he could show that he was not dead. More than anything, he wanted Bobby to hug him and tell him everything was alright as if he were a kid again. 

He wanted his family back.

Before he could think about going through with it, Sam came into the room to tell Bobby that they were ready to go. Bobby gave Dean a small pat on the head, giving him more hope that maybe things would turn out okay. If his family showed him this trust when he was an unknown skinwalker, it was possible that they would welcome him with open arms when they saw it was him. 

Dean watched through the window as the Impala drove away, heading to the warehouse where the vampires were located.

He waited hours for their return, expecting that it would not take that long.

He only began to really worry when they never came back.

It was late into the night now, and Dean knew that they should have finished with the hunt by then. They knew exactly where the nest was, had all of the right weapons, and were supposed to be in and out quickly. They should have been back a few hours ago. 

Dean had to go see what was going on. He needed to get out of that house so that he could make sure they weren’t in trouble. 

But how?

He was locked in. The front and back doors were locked, as was every single window in the place. There were no doggy doors for him to escape out of, and he was sure that even if there were that the others would have boarded it up somehow before leaving him there. He had no easy way out. 

Well… sorry, Bobby. He was a skinwalker, after all, and he had more strength than he knew what to do with. Dean had no other choice but to throw himself at one of Bobby’s windows, bursting through it with glass raining down with him. He would apologize to Bobby later, but if his gut feeling was right, they were all in trouble and needed his help. He did not have time to worry about the window. 

For the first time ever, Dean put his skinwalker abilities to good use. He followed his nose, tracking the scent of the Impala and his family. It led him to the warehouses the vampire nest was in. When he got there, he found that the Impala was parked nearby, empty. 

That meant they were still in the warehouse. 

He quickly followed their scents to the correct warehouse. The doors were huge, and he knew that it would be impossible for him to push them open without causing every vampire to hear it. Luckily, Dean spotted a window near the top of the warehouse, and there was an easy way for him to jump up and access it. He was able to climb up by using some ledges jutting out from the building. Once he made it to the window, he found that it was loose, and he was able to push through it with no problems. 

Past the window, he maneuvered himself down to a shelf as quietly as possible. Looking out into the warehouse, he saw that Bobby had been correct about it being mostly emptied out. Whatever the warehouse used to be used for he would never know because nothing had been left behind. All that was left was some of the shelves that held products. The shelves were being utilized by the vampires now, and they had makeshift beds strewn throughout the floor. 

None of that mattered, though, because Dean finally found the hunters. Somehow, the vampires managed to trap them. Sam and Bobby were tied to some chair in the middle of the room. Nearby, Castiel and Gabriel were trapped in a ring of holy fire. They were pouting, obviously mad that they were tricked into the trap. Dean had no clue how the vampires had time to create the ring of holy fire to keep the angels in since there was no way they could have expected them, but he chose not to question it for the time being.

They were in some major trouble. Sam and Bobby were likely about to become dinner for the vampires. Dean did not know if the angels would be drunk from as well since they were divine beings who did not need to stay in their meatsuits, but he did not want to find out what the vampires could potentially do to them.

He had to help them. 

Looking around the room some more, Dean tried to find something he could do to get them out of that situation. There wasn’t much in the warehouse, but he was happy to find that the vampires had yet to dispose of the weapons that the hunters had brought to fight them with. Large knives dipped in dead man’s blood layed on the floor a little ways away from where Sam and Bobby were tied up. 

Dean did not know how he was going to do this, but he knew he had to at least attempt to save them. He did not become a skinwalker only for his brother to still die way too young in front of him. 

Perhaps he could take on the vampires by using his skinwalker strength, but he did not want to take the chance. He had never fought with them before, and he barely knew his own limits. It would be best if he could get ahold of one of those knives.

Suddenly, he saw movement. Dean had been so focused on where his family was that he did not notice that the vampires were still in the room. They were watching Sam and Bobby, probably planning on how they were going to keep them alive to savor their blood. Vampires hated dead human blood, so they would not immediately kill them. Dean did not want them to be anywhere near those vampire fangs, though, so he would have to act fast.

One of the vampires began to walk closer to Sam and Bobby. There were eight of them in total, all fully grown and massively strong. Dean watched as the two humans tried to lean away from the grin that was given to them by the vampire. 

The vampire reached towards Sam, curiously pulling at something from beneath his shirt. It was hard to see from where he was at, but after looking closely, he was shocked to see that she was holding up the necklace Sam gave Dean so long ago up from where it was hiding around Sam’s neck.

Sammy had kept it all those years. 

It was now or never. Dean had to act. He jumped down from his ledge, landing on his feet before taking off running towards the vampires. He managed to get past the ones on the edges of their circle surrounding the humans, zipping past before they even realized he was there. The vampire that was gripping the necklace dropped it back to Sam’s chest and jumped back as Dean ran past her, putting himself in between the vampires and his humans.

“What is this?” The vampire asked. “A cat?”

“Chevy?” Sam questioned from behind him. 

The vampires were all sniffing the air now, using their senses to see what he was all about. 

“He’s a skinwalker,” one said.

The one in front laughed. “What’s a little skinwalker like you doing here? Are you lost?”

Dean growled at her, not finding amusement in the situation like they were. He quickly jumped to the side to grab one of the knives on the floor by the handle, lifting it up and turning back towards the vampires. The blade of the knife was silver and dripping with dead man’s blood, but the handle was safe for him to touch.

“Oh, is the teeny skinwalker going to defend these humans?” The front vampire asked. “Are you going to take us on in a small form like that?”

Dean did not want to play games. He was angry, and he did the only thing he could think of. He charged the vampire with a bold plan of jumping up and slicing her head clean off. He ran forward, determination filling his entire being. He got ready to jump and make his move -

\- only for the vampire to swat him out of the air and send him flying across the room. The knife flew out of his mouth, falling somewhere nearby. He landed on the floor, giving a giant “oomph” as he did so, the air getting knocked out of him. The vampires were cackling, mocking him for being so weak and stupid.

He could not defeat them as he was. He  _ was _ too weak. His small form had no chance of taking on eight vampires all at once. That meant he only had one choice.

He had to shift.

He didn’t want to reveal himself, especially as he was trying to save their asses, but he had to. If he didn’t, they were in major trouble. From the looks of it, it would be impossible for them to get out of there themselves. It was truly up to him to save the day.

Hopefully this time it wouldn’t lead to him getting bit and turned into another monster. He knew that would be impossible since he had skinwalker blood, but it still scared him. He wasn’t immortal, and there was all the possibility of him dying during this fight.

The vampires were turning their attention back to the hunters, thinking that Dean was no threat to them. They were wrong. He was a major threat to them.

He was about to gank their asses.

Glancing around him for the knife, Dean accidentally made eye contact with Sam. His brother looked scared, and all he could imagine in him was the twelve year old boy he protected so many years ago. He could not let him die here. He would take that fear out of Sammy’s eyes and save him once more.

Dean began running towards the knife, which was only a few feet away from the vampires. As he ran, he concentrated on shifting. Maybe if he didn’t prepare himself too much, he would be able to shift without falling over when he tried to stand on two legs. He imagined what it felt to look human, picturing the long two legs and oddly bare skin chilled in the air whereas his fur would have kept him warm. He saw the brown hair he used to have, the pearly white teeth, and the handsome, boyish face he remembered staring at in the mirror. He knew he was older now, but he couldn’t imagine how he might look now. His teenage self was all he could bear to picture.

Whatever the strategy going through his head, it seemed to work. As he ran, Dean began to grow bigger. He felt his limbs get longer, his head get larger, and his entire being overall growing taller. The objects around him were no longer twelve times his size. 

He was human.

He was naked… but he was human.

He quickly snatched the knife up by its handle, not caring if he accidentally touched the silver. There was only one goal in his mind, and he would not let himself be bothered by a tiny bit of pain when he spent years suffering from massive amounts of it. The vampires turned towards him in shock, which made Dean feel a lot of pride in himself. They were not expecting him to keep trying to fight them. 

Dean raised the knife and slashed out at the first vampire, managing to sweep its head off in one clean stroke. His strength made it easy for him to behead them in one hit, not needing to go chopping at their necks just for a kill. 

One went down, then two, and suddenly half of them were dead. Dean was having no trouble at all killing these monsters. Each swing of the knife felt natural to him as if he had been hunting for all of those years he had been trapped. It was like he never stopped.

He was fucking great at it.

The fifth vampire came after him, and he killed it with another single sweep. However, the sixth gave him more trouble. He went to swipe at her, but at the last second, she jumped to the side and dodged the knife. She was a lot more skilled than the vampires before her, but Dean did not doubt that he would be able to take her down.

But then she dodged his second attack too, ducking under his arm and knocking the knife out of his hand. She kicked the knife across the floor, too far for him to reach it. In seconds, the other two vampires were on him, grabbing his arms and restraining him. 

“How dare you,” the lady vampire growled at him. “You just killed half of my pack!”

Dean opened his mouth, but he closed it immediately. Would he be able to speak after years of being silent? He could not imagine how bad his voice would sound at the moment, and he wasn’t even sure if he remembered how to pronounce any words.

“Cat got your tongue?” The male vampire to his right asked, causing all three of them to burst out into laughter. They thought their pun was sooooo funny, but it made Dean more determined to spite them.

“C-cat k-k-killlll your-r fa-family?” Dean croaked out, wincing as he heard his voice. It was appalling - utterly atrocious. It made him never want to speak again if that was what he was going to sound like for now on.

The vampires fell silent, glaring at him.

“Yes,” the woman vampire said, “and you’re going to pay for that. I think I’ll start by killing the people you foolishly came here to save.”

Dean watched in horror as she began to approach Sam and Bobby once again. They both had wide eyes staring right at him, not noticing what was going on or that a vampire was about to attack them. Dean had no idea if they recognized him or if they were only shocked that he transformed in the first place. He felt like it was a little bit of both since he doubted he was completely recognizable right now.

As the woman got closer to them, Dean began to struggle in the grip of the other two vampires. He had to get away and stop the woman from hurting anyone. He had to fight off these two anyway he could.

Without second thinking it, Dean sunk his teeth in the arm of the vampire to his right, harshly. He immediately let go of him, howling in pain, but Dean did not release the bite. He only bit down harder, making sure that he would be leaving a large gash as the man tried to pull his arm away. His teeth scraped against skin, the metallic taste of vampire blood filling his mouth.

It was disgusting. The moment he let go of the vampire, he spit as much of it out as he could. The taste would not go away, but he would have to worry about that later. 

He managed to yank his other arm from the second vampire. The knife was too far away from him, and frankly, he did not know where it had gone. There were no others that he could see near him, so he would have to use his next best thing.

His fingernails.

Dean attacked the two vampires, slashing at their throats with his hands. He clawed at them as hard as he could, and he watched amazed as both fell swiftly from the cuts he made with his own nails. His strength was baffling to him.

He turned around to face the lady vampire only to find her already running at him. She was ready to fight him, hoping to catch him by surprise as he killed the last of her pack. She was too late, though. 

Dean slashed out one final time. Time felt like it was going in slow motion as his nail met the skin of her neck. For a second, Dean feared that he went for it too soon and that the cut would not be deep enough to kill her. He braced himself for her counterattack, knowing he did not have time to swipe again. He would have to block her before getting the chance to go for the kill again.

His arms went up in self defense.

The blow never came.

The vampire crumbled to the floor, dead. 

It was silent in the warehouse except for the loud pants coming from Dean as he calmed down from his fight, his hands on his knees. He hadn’t had that much adrenaline flowing through his body in a long time, and now that the fight was over, he felt absolutely exhausted. He wanted nothing more than to go back to Bobby’s, curl up on the old bed he used to sleep in when he was a kid, and sleep for three weeks straight. 

Somebody cleared their throat, breaking the near silence.

Oh, right. He couldn’t sleep because he had to deal with a whole new situation.

Dean stood up straight and turned to his family slowly, scared of the reactions he was about to see. Sam and Bobby still had stunned looks on their faces. Bobby was likely the one who had cleared his throat to get his attention, but he was still lost for words.

Turning to glance at the angels, Dean found that they were just as surprised as the other two were. Gabriel had his mouth wide open as if he could not believe what was happening. Castiel had a hand over his mouth, and even from the distance between them and Dean, he could tell that the angel’s face was red. Whether that was from anger or the shock of the situation, Dean was unsure. 

Dean went to walk towards the chairs the humans were tied to so that he could release them, but with the adrenaline gone from his body, he found it more difficult to move. He was suddenly forgetting how to properly use his limbs, his mind wanting to be back in the form of a cat since that was all that made sense to him anymore. It felt weird being so big, and he thought it was unfair that he was feeling this way right after a fight when he still needed to help out the others.

He slowly made his way over, keeping a wary eye on Sam and Bobby to make sure they were not going to start screaming at him and protesting. They were silent as he struggled to them, unsure of what to say or of what exactly they were seeing.

Dean used his nails to cut through the bonds keeping the hunters in the chairs, and as soon as they were free, they got up to turn around and face him once more. They all stared at each other for a moment, nobody sure of what to say.

It was Bobby who finally decided that the silence was bullshit. 

“Dean?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost stopped this chapter halfway through, but then I felt like it was way too short and needed a better ending XD so I combined it with the next chapter I had planned. I almost went on more and had to stop myself because that was a damn good cliffhanger to leave it at.  
> Anyway, I would love any constructive criticism you might have on my fighting scene. I want to get better at writing fighting scenes since I want to write my own novel one day, and I will definitely be writing some battles in that.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, I am so sorry for how long it has been since I last updated this. I know I was on such a roll before, but after the last chapter, I lost my motivation to write for a few days. Every time I went to write this chapter, I kept giving up because I hated where I was going with it. It got to the point where I wrote two pages that I hated so much that I had to erase the entire thing and start it over. However, I think this chapter might actually live up to the cliffhanger of the last chapter? To be honest, I'm not completely convinced, but it is way better than what I started writing at first lol. I like how I started this chapter, but I am still not as happy as I wanted to be with the ending. I hope you enjoy this chapter, though.   
> Also, to get my motivation back up, I watched a shit ton of anime and Masterchef in between my studying XD. I don't know why that helped so much, but it did.

Did… did Bobby just say his name? Bobby recognized him? Dean wasn’t sure he looked anything like he used to, but he must have been familiar enough for the man to know exactly who he was. 

Dean could only nod when Bobby said his name, not trusting his voice at all. The movement was awkward, especially since he was terrified of what they would do now that it was all revealed. He didn’t know what to expect. They could either trust him with open arms or full on attack him and try to kill him. Maybe they would even tie him down like the vampires did to them and make him suffer before killing him. He did not want to watch their hate for him, but it was inevitable.

He watched Bobby’s face carefully, glancing between him and Sam as he tried to read what was going on through their minds. Sam had a horrified look on his face, and Dean could only hope that it was because he was shocked by what happened to him.

“How dare you,” Sam said, making Dean’s head snap towards him to stare into his eyes. “How dare you!”

Sam was screaming now, and suddenly he was rushing towards him. Dean had to duck as Sam swung at him, and he dodged to the side to avoid Sam’s rage. Dean watched as Sam picked up one of the silver knives off of the ground and turned it towards him, holding it in front of him in preparation to attack.

Well, Sam was definitely reacting badly.

“W-Wai-t-t!” Dean tried to speak, but his voice was way too hoarse. He couldn’t understand what came out of his mouth, so he doubted anybody else would be able to tell what he was trying to say.

“How dare you kill my brother,” Sam growled at him, “and then have the balls to steal his face!”

Oh, shit. Sam wasn’t thinking properly. He wasn’t remembering anything about skinwalkers and how they worked. 

He didn’t believe he was really Dean.

“Sam, wait!” Gabriel’s voice came from where he and Castiel were still trapped by the holy fire. “He’s not-”

“No!” Sam shouted. “I will make him pay for this.”

Sam came at him again, brandishing the silver knife. Dean got into a fighting stance, planning on counter attacking and fighting for his life. He got ready to swipe out at Sam like he did with the vampires, getting ready to attack.

Here he went… any second now, his body would move to defend himself. He was preparing, aaaaaaand-

Silver sliced his flesh, the knife cutting into his arm. Dean screamed in pain as his skin burned. He staggered back, doing his best to prevent himself from falling to the ground. Sam kept coming at him, trying to hit him time and time again. Luckily, Dean was able to avoid getting hit too much. He used his speed and strength to dodge each attack, only getting hit in the shoulder once more. He defended himself by avoiding Sam, but he did not counter attack. 

He was so close to fighting back, but he knew that he would not be able to bring himself to do so. He could not attack his brother like that, especially with his strength. There was a huge possibility that Dean could accidentally hurt Sam. He could potentially kill him! He refused to lash out even a little bit against him.

After killing all of the vampires and now having to face his brother, Dean was absolutely exhausted. He could feel his movements becoming slower, and he knew that any time soon he would fall at Sam’s hands. Another slash from the knife swept across his skin, hitting him right across the hand as Dean tried to block it. He hissed, trying not to show too much weakness by screaming again.

He could handle this. He deserved this. He hurt Sam by disappearing on him so long ago and becoming a monster.

He would let Sam kill him if it came to it.

“Sammy, please,” Dean managed to get out, straining his voice to be as clear as he could get it. It was terribly rough, but he could tell that the words at least made sense now. “I-”

“Don’t call me that!” Sam yelled. “You do not get to steal his nickname too!”

Sam’s attacks became wilder after that. He was getting more determined to defeat him, and he threw all of his power at him. The knife cut him against his chest as he got past Dean’s blocks, sending pain all throughout Dean’s body.

Dean was suddenly sprawled on the ground.

His chest burned, and his arms desperately applied pressure against the new wound. It made his skin sting worse, but he couldn’t bear not attempting to hold himself together. He was willing to let Sam kill him, but that did not necessarily mean he  _ wanted _ to die. 

Dean stared up at Sam as his brother stood over him, the knife held right over his head. Sam had a wicked gleam in his eyes. Dean could see how determined he was to kill what he believed took his brother from him. 

Dean shut his eyes tightly, not wanting to see the knife come down on him for the finishing blow. He didn’t want to see the hate in his brother’s eyes as he killed him. He wished this was not the last thing he was going to remember, but he hoped that if he couldn’t see his last seconds then he could pretend like he wasn’t about to be slaughtered by his family.

He braced himself, waiting for the knife to come down.

Um… he braced himself? Waiting for the knife to come down?

-

Huh?

What was taking him so long to kill him? Did he want Dean to watch him before he swung?

And then there was the sound of the knife clanging to the ground next to him, barely missing him. Dean’s eyes shot open, confused on what was happening. He thought maybe Sam was going to do this slowly instead of killing him right away. Maybe he was about to be tortured for years again.

But when he opened his eyes, he found Sam being restrained by Gabriel. The angel was gripping his arms, holding them away from Dean so that Sam could not lunge at him. 

“Let me go,” Sam demanded, struggling in Gabriel’s hold. “How did you even get out of the holy fire?”

“Bobby put it out,” Gabriel said, “and no, I will not let you go.”

“Why not?” 

“Because you’re making a mistake.”

Sam glared at his boyfriend, unsure of how he could say that. “He killed Dean! You know how much he meant to me!”

“That is Dean!” Gabriel shouted, trying to shake some sense into Sam.

“Dean is dead! You even told me that he was in Heaven!”

“No,” Castiel said as he came into view. He stood between Dean and Sam, adding another line of defense. “We told you that God said he was, but we never saw him there. Obviously, our father lied to us as yours did to you.”

“But-” Sam tried to argue, but was cut off again by Bobby, who also came to protect Dean.

“Sam,” Bobby said, “skinwalkers only have one human form. A human turned skinwalker keeps their original human form, and skinwalkers born would not look so much like Dean like this. He’s older, but you can see it, Sam! He looks exactly like Dean!”

Sam stared wide eyed at Dean, but he did not look fully convinced. Dean looked away, unable to meet his gaze. He felt ashamed that this fight was happening: that his brother went so long thinking he was dead because he was stupid enough to get bit years ago that he was quick to believe that he was faking his face and tricking him into thinking he was Dean.

It made him sad, but he had no one to blame but himself.

“But… but what if he’s somehow tricking us?” Sam asked. “What if he’s not even a skinwalker? What if this is something we’ve never seen before?”

“He’s definitely a skinwalker,” Gabriel said. “Trust me, it’s not a trick.”

As Gabriel and Bobby tried to convince Sam that Dean was actually Dean, Castiel turned towards Dean to check up on him. Dean was still looking away, not wanting to watch what was happening and scared that things were going to turn bad again. He really did not want to die, and he hoped that they would all trust him and let him live soon.

Dean jumped in fright as he felt something land on his shoulders. His eyes shot forward, expecting the worst, but he was relieved and confused by what really happened.

Castiel’s trench coat was draped around his shoulders.

Dean watched as Castiel kneeled down in front of him, reaching out to help him get his arms through the sleeves. They were long on him, pooling past his hands. He didn’t realize how small he was, but years of being a cat and not eating had caused him to not be as muscular and big as he would have liked. He would have to work out and eat lots of food later to not be a scrawny mess of a man. He did not wish to be severely underweight anymore. 

“Dean Winchester,” Castiel said as he began to button up the trench coat around him. “It’s nice to meet you as a human, Chevy. How do you feel?”

“I- okay?” Dean said, but it was phrased more like a question in his confusion. He barely heard Castiel’s words, his mind running too wild with everything that was happening.

“You don’t have to lie to me, Dean. I know this must be a lot for you,” Castiel said. He snapped the last buttons together, successfully covering Dean up. He should have been embarrassed about being naked in front of everybody, but he found that he did not care much about that. Even so, he was still grateful for Castiel being considerate enough to make sure he had something to wear. 

“But, the blood?” Dean asked, concerned that he was bleeding all over Castiel’s coat.

“I’ll wash it later. It’ll come out, don’t worry. Now, let’s try to heal you so that you’re not in as much pain.”

Castiel reached forward to press his fingers to Dean’s forehead. Dean sighed at the familiar feeling of his grace flowing into him, healing the wounds that Sam afflicted on him. His skin was still red and had some light pain, but the cuts closed and most of the pain went away.

“Thank you,” Dean whispered. Castiel smiled at him, cupping his cheeks with his palms and letting Dean lean into them.

Damn, he was really in love with this angel.

Castiel helped Dean get to his feet. The trench coat fell to right above his knees, covering all of his junk. This was the first time in years that he had worn clothes, and it felt very odd. He almost wanted to throw it off of him because of how unused to it he was, but he didn’t. It felt weird, but also strangely calming. He knew part of the strangeness came from being in his human form again, but wearing clothes made him actually feel like he was hanging onto his humanity. 

It was silent around them, and looking over revealed that the other three had stopped arguing. Sam was staring at him again, but this time it was without the anger it held before. His brother stepped toward him, and Dean couldn’t help but try and hide himself behind Castiel.

He hated being scared of his brother, but he really did not want to die today.

“I-” Sam started, but he could not get the words out of his mouth. He looked down in sadness, trying to figure out what to say. He still wasn’t fully convinced, but he knew that Bobby and Gabriel would not lie to him like that. 

He really did look so much like his brother…

His brother who was scared of him.

Castiel nudged Dean forward, trying to get him to talk to Sam. “He won’t hurt you, now. He was understandably skeptical, but he’ll listen. If he doesn’t, we’ll protect you.”

Dean didn’t look away from Sam, but he nodded at Castiel’s words. He would trust that he would not be attacked anymore. 

He wanted to show Sam that he was safe.

Dean did not cower this time when Sam approached him. They stood in front of each other, neither sure of what to say. It was awkward for a moment, and Dean did not want to be the one to start this conversation. 

“Can you maybe tell me something only Dean would know?” Sam asked. “It would really make it easier for me to believe this is actually happening.”

Dean thought for a moment. What was something only he would know? He couldn’t remember any of their inside jokes because of the years of torture he went through. He had no idea what Sam told others when he talked about him. He could say something and be immediately shot down because Sam had spread that story around to everyone. Dean thought long and hard, attempting to figure out what could fully convince Sam. 

“That necklace around your neck that the vampire tried to take from you,” Dean said, his voice shaky and rough but his words overall clear, “you gave it to me.”

“Everyone knows that,” Sam said, “you could have gotten that from anywhere.”

“I was wearing it the day we went to fight that pack of skinwalkers,” Dean continued, ignoring the interruption. “When John was taking me to the Bunker, it fell off because I was in so much pain from transforming that I was moving around too much. Da-John threw me in that cage and… and it was gone. It was the only thing I had to remember you by and it was gone.”

Dean started crying. He knew that this wasn’t enough to prove to Sam that he was telling the truth. There was no way that Sam would believe that he wasn’t just making it all up. However, he couldn’t go on talking. He couldn’t try to find something else to say. All he could seem to do was cry.

He had never cried this much in his life.

Dean thought Sam was going to attack him again. He figured that his tears would be for not and that the silver would be slicing through his skin once more. He was scared that he was about to die right then, right there.

What Dean was not expecting was a hug.

He was suddenly being pulled towards a chest, Sammy’s arms tight around him as he held him tight against him. Dean broke down fully, allowing himself to sob into Sam’s shirt. Sam did not care that Dean was getting tears and snot all over him. Dean even felt tears begin to hit his hair as Sam silently cried with him. He closed his eyes, pressing further into the hug. It was such a perfect hug, and it felt so, so good. 

“Dean,” Sam’s voice broke completely, finally believing him. “You-You were locked in a cage. We found you being tortured!”

“Yeah…” Dean said, frowning into Sam’s chest. Looking back on this later, it would likely bruise his pride, but at the moment, he did not care. He was going to hug his brother, damnit, and he wasn’t going to shy away from his emotions for once in his life. “But… you saved me from it without even knowing it was me.”

Sam pulled away, holding Dean at arm’s length so that they could see each other’s faces. 

“Why, Dean?” Sam asked when they were both more calmed down. “Why were you there? Why did John lock you up like that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Dean asked. “I’m a skinwalker. When I saved you from that one from years ago, I got bit and turned.”

“So? You were his son! You did everything for that man, yet as soon as one bad thing happens after you do something so heroic, he shuts you away and tortures you for years! You clearly have self control and won’t go attacking anyone and everyone. I- He didn’t have to hurt you for so long and let me believe that you were gone forever.”

“He thought I would be dangerous.”

“No offense, Dean, but you were more of an innocent kitten than most kittens I’ve met.”

“Hey!” Dean pulled away, offended. “I am perfectly ferocious!”

“You’ve purred in my lap before, dude. That’s not very manly.”

Dean huffed. “Well, I’m not much of a man anymore, am I?”

Sam’s eyes softened more. “Yes, you are. You’re still Dean, and I’ve finally found you after years of trying to bring you back. It didn’t happen the way I thought it would since I assumed I would have to bring you back from the dead, but this works too. I’m sorry for attacking you, but I-I-”

“I understand. You went so long thinking I was dead. It’s only natural that you would think that I was tricking you. I promise, though, that it’s me, Sammy. It’s me.”

They grinned at each other. Dean was relieved that Sam finally accepted him. He had been so scared that he would throw him back in that cage and hate him forever that he forgot that Sam missed him as much as he missed him. Sammy had always been the more accepting out of the two of them, and he should have seen sooner that things would have turned out fine with all of the talk about them trusting demons, werewolves, and vampires on cases before. Sure, his initial reaction was bad, but now that he knew there were no tricks and that it was really Dean, he was more than happy to accept him back into his life.

“You’ve still got it when it comes to hunting,” Sam said. “You took out those vampires like it was nothing.”

Dean laughed. It felt great to laugh. “You didn’t think I would forget all of my training just because I was put away for years, did you? I’m still a better hunter than you anyday, especially with my new strength. I was only going easy on you during that fight.”

“I know, dude, I am just surprised that even when healing you’re still a badass. I don’t know about you being a better hunter than me, but we can always put that to test in the future.”

The future. Dean had a future with his family.

Once Sam let go of their hug, Dean was immediately swept up into another one from Bobby. 

“I can’t believe it’s you, boy,” Bobby said as he gently held him. This was Dean’s father figure. This was the man that was better to him than John ever was. Dean missed the oddly comforting hugs that Bobby would give.

“I missed you guys,” Dean said when they broke the hug.

“It’s been way too hard without you. It’s very refreshing to see you.”

“I’m sure John only got worse when I was gone.”

“You don’t know the least of it,” Sam said.

Dean frowned at him. “Oh, Sammy, I’m so sorry.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “No, I’m not blaming you, Dean. He abandoned and tortured you after you saved me! You didn’t deserve that. He didn’t do anything to me that was as bad as that, and I’m sorry that I didn’t find you sooner.”

“That’s not your fault, either,” Dean told him.

“This is a touching family reunion,” Gabriel said, “but I feel like we should probably leave the warehouse filled with vampire corpses now.”

Dean looked around him. He completely forgot about where they were. It was insane that he had just fought off so many vampires only minutes before, and now they were having an emotional moment together. 

“I honestly can’t believe you kept your mouth shut for so long,” Sam said to Gabriel.

“Hey,” Gabriel said, “I didn’t want to interrupt such a sweet scene too soon.”

The five of them went to leave the warehouse, agreeing that they would be much more comfortable to catch up and talk at Bobby’s house where there weren’t dead vampires everywhere they looked.

As they began to walk towards the door, Dean found it hard to walk. He was so very tired, and he was still not used to walking on two human legs yet, especially not for longer distances. He stumbled along, trying to keep up with the others, but he quickly fell behind and made the others have to slow down too.

“Sorry,” Dean said, feeling useless.

“Don’t be sorry,” Castiel said, “it’s going to take you a while to get used to being in your human form again.”

“We’ll help you, dude,” Sam said. “We’re going to support you as you get used to everything and heal from your trauma.”

Dean smiled, ecstatic that he had a family again. “Thanks.”

Sam and Castiel both helped Dean get to the car. Sam got in the driver’s seat since he was the most used to driving the Impala, and Bobby hopped into the passenger’s seat. Castiel helped Dean into the back before rounding to the other side of the car to climb into the middle, Gabriel on his other side. The angels could have easily flown back to Bobby’s, but they wanted to be with them to help Dean.

On the drive back, Dean felt himself becoming more and more exhausted. His eyes grew heavy, but he did not want to fall asleep. He wanted to keep talking to the others in order to catch up more and learn about how Sam grew up, but it was getting so hard to keep up.

“You’ll be able to talk to us when you wake up,” Bobby said when he noticed how tired Dean was. “Get some rest. You deserve it after everything you’ve been through.”

Dean felt guilty for falling asleep on them, but he had to agree that it would be better if he slept. A tiny part of him feared that he would wake up to find that this was all a dream and that he never left the cage. He knew that was silly, though, so he decided to allow himself to get some sleep.

It was somewhat uncomfortable in the Impala since Dean did not know where to rest his head. Leaning it back hurt his neck and his head ached too much from the tiredness to press it against the door. He knew he could not sleep upright or there would be a nasty crink in his neck later on from whatever direction his head would fall.

There was only one option that he could think of, but he was too embarrassed to try it. He knew that Castiel used to comfort him and sleep next to him when he was a cat, but it was different now that he was human. It would be a lot more awkward, especially with how Dean had fucking feelings for this dude. He would not attempt to lean his head against him because he knew he would just be pushed away.

He spent the rest of the drive uncomfortably closing his eyes and pretending like he was allowing himself to fall asleep. He did not dare let himself pass out for real, but he also didn’t want them to question why he was so adamant on staying awake. He simply did not want to accidentally lean against Castiel and make it even more awkward between them. All he had to do for the next few minutes was control his breathing and not flutter his eyes too much.

The drive wasn’t too long, fortunately, so he was able to stop the ruse quickly. He pretended like the car turning off woke him enough to be aware of everything around him again. They all got out of the car, and Dean was escorted through Bobby’s front door.

“Do you want anything to eat, Dean?” Bobby asked, “or do you want to head straight to bed? I’m not sure if I have anything appropriate enough for a skinwalker, but we can see what there is.”

“He looks like he’s about to pass out at any moment,” Gabriel said. “We gave him some meat this morning, so he should be good until tomorrow. Sam and I can go get some tonight while he sleeps.”

“Is there anything else you can eat?” Sam asked Dean. “I know you have to eat hearts, but it wouldn’t hurt you physically to eat anything else, right?”

Dean thought about it. “I’m not sure. I’ve never tried anything else.”

“Well, we can test it out tomorrow if you’d like. I’m sure there are foods that you’ve missed.”

Dean grinned. “Hell yeah. I want a bacon cheeseburger so badly. Not just the meat like usual, but the entire burger. And fries. Ooooh, and a milkshake would be so nice. I don’t even remember what those taste like anymore, but I recall loving them when we were kids.”

Sam looked sad at that, but he promised Dean that he would get him some of his required food for breakfast and then would take him to a diner for dinner so that he could start catching up on all of the food he missed out on over the years. 

Of course, Dean was super duper excited for that.

Dean was then led to the room that he and Sam would stay in when they were kids. He was able to change into some more comfortable pajamas. Whose they were, he did not know, but they were soft and warm, so he did not care. The beds were big enough for full sized adults, so there was no problem with laying Dean down on his old bed and pulling the covers up around him.

“Are you comfortable?” Sam asked, concerned for his brother.

“This is perfect,” Dean reassured him. Their dynamic was so weird currently. Dean was used to the two of them always caring for each other, but it was never this dramatic. He hoped they could get back to teasing and pranking each other soon. 

It would be like the good old days.

“Good. Gabriel and I are going to go get some food for tomorrow, then,” Sam said. “It’s getting towards when shops open up for the day. I’ll see you when you wake up.”

Sam left the room, turning the lights off as he went so that the room was completely dark. It was much easier for Dean to try to sleep in the darkness. Sam left Castiel to watch over Dean so that he would not accidentally hurt himself.

Dean felt himself starting to drift off, but everything he got close to passing out, he was jolted awake by the thoughts of nightmares consuming him as usual. He did not want to go through more nightmares, and he was sure that he would start panicking even more if he woke up from them in this human body since he was not anywhere close to being used to it.

“Dean,” Castiel said when he saw him force himself awake for the third time in a row.

“Yes, Cas?” Dean asked. 

Castiel blushed at the nickname, not expecting it. “Would it help if I were to join you like we do in the Bunker?”

Dean’s breath hitched from the question. “But I was a cat then.”

“So?”

“Wouldn’t that be awkward? Especially since this bed is a twin, which is significantly smaller than the beds at the Bunker?”

“Why would it be awkward?”

“Because I’m human and you would be cuddling me.” Dean felt stupid just saying it out loud.

“I knew you could turn human from the start of me helping you sleep, so I don’t see why that matters. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but don’t say no because you think I’ll feel embarrassed by it.”

Dean knew his face was completely red from that, and he hoped that angels didn’t have dark vision or else Castiel would surely be able to tell. He almost told Castiel that he was fine because he was embarrassed about it, but he knew in his heart that that wasn’t what he wanted.

He wanted to feel safe and protected in his arms again.

“Okay,” Dean whispered, thinking that maybe he was too quiet for the angel to hear. Castiel didn’t miss his response, though, and he began to climb into the bed with Dean. The bed was not made for two people, but they made it work. Castiel shifted Dean so that he was laying on top of him, Dean’s face pressed into Castiel’s neck. The angel tucked the blanket around him tighter before wrapping his arms around him, holding him close. Dean sighed happily against his throat, pleased to be exactly where he was.

As he peacefully drifted off to sleep, Dean found himself truly at ease for the first time ever.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! I always love getting constructive criticism if you have any, compliments if you'd like, or any other feedback you may have! I'll update soon since I am very into writing this plot now, so stay tuned!


End file.
